Top 55 Eddie Marsan Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.’

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.

The hardest thing to do and most miserable films are comedies.

I love Bethnal Green and where I’m from. Nothing there, especially the people, ever held me back, but I never felt that I was successful there.

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

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.

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.

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

I thought ‘Lock Stock’ was a good film. I thought ‘Lock Stock’ was a good film because I think it was a one-off before it was imitated a hundred times.

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

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.

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 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.

My career is playing the guys who go, ‘Boo.’ That’s what I do.

I had a good job as a printer in the East End. Before the unions destroyed it, that job was very lucrative.

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!

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.

I always define egotistical thoughts as the thoughts I think other people have of me.

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.

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 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.

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.

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’ve got four kids – I unblock a toilet every day.

Art is the job of the privileged.

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.

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.

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.

My friends I grew up with were so supportive to me. And I’m not the only one who’s done well.

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

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.

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.

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 knew very early on that I wasn’t Brad Pitt.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

I know what I try to do. I try to be professional, turn up, not make too much fuss, do the job.

You turn up on set, and somebody who has come out of Oxford, has done a BBC course, is telling you how to act. You think, ‘Do me a favour. Go and make a coffee.’

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

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.

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

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

If your character doesn’t express himself or doesn’t feel confident expressing himself, then you don’t express yourself.

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.