Eddie Marsan Quotes

‘Ray Donovan’ is very dark and very serious. As actors will tell you, the darker and more serious the material, the more jokes that go around set. It’s a counterbalance.

I’m used to playing characters who have a lot to say but don’t know how to say it.

I want to be respected as an actor. There’s my ego. But I don’t have a great need to be liked by an audience.

I’ve never played a gay character on screen, so that would be interesting. I’ve never played a gay character, and that would fascinate me because I’m not gay, so that would interest me.

I love the fact that everyone‘s trying to be good-looking in L.A. – then I turn up and I get work.

When I first started doing press, one of the things people started pushing was this idea that I’d somehow escaped something. And I was really offended, because I hadn’t escaped anything.

When I was doing fringe theatre, my ambition was to do repertory. When I got to rep it was to do national theatre; then it was t,o get a couple of parts in television. I never had this great desire to overreach myself. I was too busy enjoying acting. I was just obsessed with it.

I knew what kind of actor I was going to be, and I looked for inspiration to people like Alec Guinness, Cyril Cusack, Timothy Spall and Jim Broadbent. I looked at them and thought, ‘They play human beings as they really are.’

The characters in ‘Ray Donovan’ are not very articulate – we’re the worst Irish family you could ever live next to in L.A.

If you leave me waiting ’round for hours and then call on me to do something, I need to be able to do it straight away. That’s my job, like your job is to do what you do.

If you’re confident, then it helps you live up to your potential, but if you believe because you went to a certain school it means you’re entitled to have a particular career, you’ll fall flat on your face eventually.

Private education can give you confidence, which is marvellous; a sense of entitlement isn’t.

I listen to a lot of jazz. I’m a big Sinatra geek. I love Chet Baker.

I wasn’t that hard. I wasn’t that tough. I wasn’t that funny – I looked like me.

I’m very blue collar myself. So it was easy for me to embody that in a sense. It’s much harder for me to embody Norrell than it is to embody Terry Donovan.

I’m like a mechanic. If you break down and phone the AA, they’ll come to you whether it’s raining or snowing. That’s what an actor should do.

Major film stars tend to do a film and then have a couple of months off. I’m not a major film star; I’m a jobbing actor.

The trick to acting is not to show off, it’s to think the thoughts of the character.

I always think of Gilbert Norrell as being Salieri to Jonathan Strange being Mozart.

I was approached to do something for seven years, and it was a quality project. I did seriously think about it, but I didn’t want to be away for six months of the year. I’ve never done the L.A. thing where you go and have loads of meetings; I can’t say to my wife, ‘I’m going to wait by a pool for six months.’

I could not be one of those actors who stays in character all day long. I’d go mad.

You’re not going to have something set on a council estate that explores all elements of human existence, the variety of experience inherent in any community.

Magic symbolises the subconscious – that part of us that is creative and powerful that we sometimes don’t tap into.

I’m used to being in front of camera and knowing what to think. But if you’re asking me to be me, I get very self-conscious. My job isn’t to be me. Being an actor, people think you can do a eulogy at a funeral, a speech at a wedding. I find all that very nerve-racking.

What I love about the East End is that there’s a great perseverance, determination and courage. What I dislike about it is that there is sometimes a celebration of ignorance.

I come from a council estate in Tower Hamlets, and by no means am I the only person who has done well – one of my friends is head of year in a great school in Twickenham. Another is a writer; another is an artist, a musician.

I don’t look like Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise. When you put me on the screen, the women don’t want to make love to me, and the men don’t want to be me.

When I think of character actors, I think of Spencer Tracy; I think of Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall. When I was a young lad watching films, my eyes were on them – watching ‘On the Waterfront,’ my eyes are on Rod Steiger and Karl Malden, not on Brando.

I didn’t do well at school, and I don’t have lots of academic reference points.

I’m a great believer that actors are very similar to session musicians. You wouldn’t ask a session musician, ‘How do you play jazz,’ and then, ‘How do you play classical?’ They just do it, because if they don’t do it, they don’t eat.

I sometimes think if I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and looked like a handsome young guy who could be in an Evelyn Waugh novel or something, I’d be a massive movie star. But there’s a longevity to what I do. It’s more reliable. Someone isn’t deciding that I’m the next big thing.

I used to do a lot of comedy. I don’t know what happened. I think it’s my face.

When I was a struggling actor, I worked for a party company. One of my friends from school was working for an advertising agency, and I turned up to one of his company’s parties dressed as an alien to collect tickets on the door.

I’m the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they’re doing. When you play a villain, you don’t play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.

I have my career and my family, and that’s it.

I’m not a great fiction reader. I love history. I love history and philosophy.

Art is the job of the privileged.

I consciously decided not to be a ‘London‘ actor. Those gangster movies made a lot of East End actors think they were movie stars. And I was very aware that they were going to go out of fashion.

I wanted to work with Bryan Singer because I like his films.

There’s no great mystery to acting. It’s a very simple thing to do but you have to work hard at it. It’s about asking questions and using your imagination.

As children, we all hold on to the myth of omnipotence. Comics are successful because kids identify with superheroes. They’ll read a book or watch a TV programme and say, ‘I’m that guy.’ And that guy is always the one in control.

Mr. Norrell is like a librarian trying to do magic… That’s the story of my career, really. I stand next to good looking men and make them look better!

I’m not one of these actors who can make a bad script good. Some actors, a script can be terrible, and they can bring something to it and make it really special. I can’t.