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When you watch 'Ray Donovan,' you think that it's about Hollywood, about scandal, about stars, and about trying to keep secrets. That's true, but that's also just the means by which you reveal secrets of the people suffering every day life.
Eddie Marsan -
My friends I grew up with were so supportive to me. And I'm not the only one who's done well.
Eddie Marsan
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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.
Eddie Marsan -
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 -
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 -
I've got four kids - I unblock a toilet every day.
Eddie Marsan -
My business is not to show anybody anything; my job is just to do it.
Eddie Marsan -
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
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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.
Eddie Marsan -
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.
Eddie Marsan -
I always think of Gilbert Norrell as being Salieri to Jonathan Strange being Mozart.
Eddie Marsan -
I love the fact that everyone's trying to be good-looking in L.A. - then I turn up and I get work.
Eddie Marsan -
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.
Eddie Marsan -
I listen to a lot of jazz. I'm a big Sinatra geek. I love Chet Baker.
Eddie Marsan
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I have my career and my family, and that's it.
Eddie Marsan -
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 -
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.'
Eddie Marsan -
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.'
Eddie Marsan -
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.
Eddie Marsan -
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
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Art is the job of the privileged.
Eddie Marsan -
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 -
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 -
Paddy Considine is a great friend of mine, and he is a natural actor because he is an artist, and I'm not an artist. If I ever blow my own trumpet, it's as a craftsman.
Eddie Marsan