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The trick to acting is not to show off it's to think the thoughts of the character. I was lucky because when I started acting, it was doing jobs above pubs. I learned to act in anonymity, so by the time people saw me, I knew what I was doing. I was crap for years, but no one saw me being crap. It's a trade you learn.

Eddie Marsan

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Eddie Marsan
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: June 9
Actor
Film Actor
Stage Actor
Television Actor
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More quotes by Eddie Marsan

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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
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I have friends who are leading men, and they're only ever allowed to play leading men of a certain type. But as a character actor, there's a wider variety of projects available. On the big Hollywood films, all they care about is having their lead in place, so it's actually easier for someone like me to slip in. And I'm happy to do so.
Eddie Marsan
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The trick to acting is not to show off, it's to think the thoughts of the character.
Eddie Marsan
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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.
Eddie Marsan
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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
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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.
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
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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
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I wanted to work with Bryan Singer because I like his films.
Eddie Marsan
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My business is not to show anybody anything my job is just to do it.
Eddie Marsan
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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.
Eddie Marsan
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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.
Eddie Marsan
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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 recognises you. I said: What are you saying? That I should do more love scenes?
Eddie Marsan
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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.'
Eddie Marsan
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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
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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.
Eddie Marsan
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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
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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