103 Quotes by Eddie Marsan

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’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 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.

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’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 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.

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.

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