Eddie Marsan Quotes
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My career is playing the guys who go, 'Boo.' That's what I do.
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My friends I grew up with were so supportive to me. And I'm not the only one who's done well.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I've got four kids - I unblock a toilet every day.
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You can't write a screenplay if you've been doing a zero-hours contract. Which means that the people who write drama, the people who commission dramas, and the people who direct dramas all come from a small circle of society.
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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.
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I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. 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.
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I always think of Gilbert Norrell as being Salieri to Jonathan Strange being Mozart.
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My business is not to show anybody anything; my job is just to do it.
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Art is the job of the privileged.
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I love the fact that everyone's trying to be good-looking in L.A. - then I turn up and I get work.
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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.
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I listen to a lot of jazz. I'm a big Sinatra geek. I love Chet Baker.
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I have my career and my family, and that's it.
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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.'
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In my family, there was no celebration of ignorance. They'd come and see Chekhov or Shakespeare. I've got a sister who got a first in her degree. We don't sit around watching TV all the time.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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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.