It wouldn't be quite correct to say that a cult has gathered around Eddie Marsan. But the Londoner has become one of those actors whom connoisseurs of cinema properly savour. Indeed, I couldn't trust a person who, aware of Eddie's work, didn't rate him among the best in the business.
A compact man with an endlessly interesting face, he is known as Inspector Lestrade in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, as the mad driving instructor in Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky and as any number of further eccentrics and obsessives.
“I was talking to Jason Solomons the other day,” he says. “They’re doing a retrospective on Sky Arts and he noticed there were 101 films. And I’m still broke. I’ve been in this business for 25 years and I’ve never been the next big thing.”
He doesn't need to trot out any creaky cliches about "family being the most important thing". We speak at Heathrow Airport as, just 24 hours after flying in to catch his son's rugby match, he prepares to fly back to LA for work on the TV series Ray Donovan.
“The biggest challenge in this is making family work,” Marsan says. “I have so many friends who are now in the business and have young children. The last conversation I ever had with Philip Seymour Hoffman, just before he died, was about the logistics of seeing children. That’s always on your mind.”
Eccentric
This week we get to see Eddie as a maths Olympiad coach in the charming Brit flick X+Y. Attempting to do for algebra what Billy Elliott did for ballet, the picture gives Marsan another chance to play the mildly obsessed eccentric.
It's something he does well. The face may be benign when at rest, but he has the capacity to inject worrying levels of fury into the mildest gesture. His performance as Olivia Colman's horrifically abusive husband in Tyrannosaur was among the most alarming in recent cinema.
You shouldn’t need to be told that Eddie could hardly be less like that in the flesh. Rather than bedding down in any sort of trendy loft, he and his wife, a make-up artist, share a house in suburban Chiswick with their four children. It all sounds positively delightful.
“Right now, I live 50-50 in Chiswick and in LA,” he says. “To be honest, by the time I began earning a living at acting, I was too old to care about trendy lofts.”
Good point. Now 46, Eddie was raised by working-class parents in the Bethnal Green area of east London. After leaving school without any qualifications, he served an apprenticeship as a printer while working for a bookmaker.
“When I finished my apprenticeship, he was my benefactor and I wanted to be an actor. So he sent me to drama school,” he says. “When I came out I was unemployed for six years. But I was very stubborn. I studied three nights a week. When I was in my early 30s and began to get work, I knew what I was doing. I had confidence, not in myself, but in the process. I am not good at acting. I just know how to do it. I am not a natural.”
This is interesting language. Marsan sees acting as closer to a trade than a vocation. He speaks about the business as one might speak about being a stonemason or a carpenter.
“It is a trade,” he says. “Somebody recently said to me, ‘You went from being an apprentice printer to an apprentice actor’. And that’s right. I have a very working-class attitude to it all.”
This is an interesting time to bring up the subject of class in acting. Over the last decade or so, something peculiar has been happening at the top end of British acting. There have always been posh actors in the business. But suddenly alumni of the top public schools are everywhere on screen and stage. Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Dominic West and Damian Lewis all attended Eton. Benedict Cumberbatch was at Harrow. They are all fine actors, but does Eddie worry that working-class actors are being squeezed out?
“I do worry about that,” he says. “It’s a terrible thing for the industry. Obviously, nobody is saying Benedict and Eddie Redmayne are bad actors. The problem is, there are other people with that potential who are losing out. And it’s not just actors. Writers, people who are commissioning stuff: they are all from the same background. That’s not right.”
At any rate, Marsan (who, unusually for a leftish individual, regrets the decline of the UK's grammar school system) remains a stalwart of working-class professionalism in the industry. Michael Mann hired him for Miami Vice. Martin Scorsese used him in Gangs of New York. Terrence Malick had some Eddie in The New World. Clearly, there are still places where old school ties are not required.
“I think the reason that people like them hire British and Irish actors is that we solve problems,” he says. “I open my toolbox and get on with the job. We learn the lines and avoid the furniture. Some of those Hollywood stars can be a bit high-maintenance.”
I’m sure he’s too professional to name names. “No. No. But I can’t wait until I’m that famous, so I can be a right pain in the arse. Ha ha.”
I don’t believe it for a minute.
X+Y is in cinemas
MAGIC MIKE LEIGH: LESSONS OF A MASTER
“You get into a different zone of habitation,” says Marsan of the director. “Every artist asks the question: should I be clever or should I be honest? Mike teaches you to be honest. My job is to create a character. I’m not a showy actor. I don’t show the audience anything. I trust them to see it themselves.”
