Eddie Marsan Quotes

#1. I see all these people talking about acting as a great spiritual thing. It's not. 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.

Eddie Marsan

#2. Mike Leigh taught me about making choices - as an actor, you choose between being honest and clever, and with Mike, it's always about being honest. I learned how to behave on a film set from Jim Broadbent. He was a great example of someone with a fantastic career who kept his feet on the ground.

Eddie Marsan

#3. 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.

Eddie Marsan

#4. Different races never fazed me because coming from Bethnal Green, I'd been around people of different races forever. Different class? That was much harder.

Eddie Marsan

#5. I went swimming the other day and my wife was watching and she said, 'You know, it's funny, it's when you've got no clothes on, no one recognizes you.' I said, 'What are you saying? That I should do more love scenes?'

Eddie Marsan

#6. 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.

Eddie Marsan

#7. It's a very fascinating thing for an actor to play somebody who is suffering, and you have to express the suffering, but in an inarticulate way and sometimes a dysfunctional way, through violence.

Eddie Marsan

#8. I was brought up in a house full of women; the first time I realised no one was interrupting me was when I was on stage - that's probably the subconscious reason I became an actor.

Eddie Marsan

#9. 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.

Eddie Marsan

#10. 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.

Eddie Marsan

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

Eddie Marsan

#12. I wasn't one of the ones voted most likely to succeed when I was at drama school, but I persevered and concentrated on the acting rather than going to the right parties and getting the right agent. Eventually, after ten years, it paid off.

Eddie Marsan

#13. With a face like mine, I'm never going to play a character who conquers the universe, I'm going to play characters who are subject to forces bearing down on them. My career's based on how we are rather than how we wish we were - they get the good-looking boys in for that kind of role.

Eddie Marsan

#14. 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.

Eddie Marsan

#15. 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.

Eddie Marsan

#16. My idea is just to do something different each time; the next thing I do has to be completely different to the thing I've done before - that's what I try and do, because you know, I'm an actor, not a film star.

Eddie Marsan

#17. I come from a place where there's violence and inarticulacy. I worked in a pub from the age of 12 or 13. I used to see people smashing glasses over each other. I was never tough. I was scared of them.

Eddie Marsan

#18. 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.

Eddie Marsan

#19. 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.

Eddie Marsan

#20. My business is not to show anybody anything; my job is just to do it.

Eddie Marsan

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

Eddie Marsan

#22. I've got four kids to feed and a wife to provide for. It's a worry but a great responsibility as well and one I relish.

Eddie Marsan

#23. As a working-class actor, leaving school with no qualifications, being a printer and then becoming an actor and then working with people who to a certain extent had had a leg up. I never had that advantage. It's less an artistic need to express myself and more a need to prove myself.

Eddie Marsan

#24. When you're the youngest and the only boy, you get spoilt but you get told you're spoilt so you don't get to enjoy it very much. I was the only man in the house because my parents divorced and my dad moved away when I was 13.

Eddie Marsan

#25. 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.

Eddie Marsan