A Quote by Eddie Marsan
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.
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I think when I was 12, I started reading Evelyn Waugh, and I loved Evelyn Waugh so much, and I thought: 'This is how the world really is. If I could be Evelyn Waugh, then I would be happy.'
Decline and Fall was a very depressing Evelyn Waugh novel, I think it was his first. I didn't get it at all, and then I got to love Waugh. And I think that maybe "Cosmopolitans" has a bit of an Evelyn Waugh vibe to it at some point.
What I wanted to do was drown something enormous, like a Star Trek or Star Wars kind of space opera-type thing, but actually make it about someone who was just married to the wrong guy, and that guy just happens to be this amazing dictator, and she has to get her kids as far away as possible from this guy. So something that could almost be a TV movie, if you'd ground it and set it in Wisconsin or something like that, but to give it this enormous setting.
Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.
People's instinct when they hear someone is madly obsessed with Star Wars or Harry Potter or something like that, they think that it's odd and not as cool as being a massive sports fan or film nerd. But I think it's amazing and something that should be celebrated and definitely not looked down on or misunderstood.
When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.
Most people who've had a big hit movie like 'Paranormal Activity,' the next thing they say is, 'I want to make a $100 million movie.' I have no interest in making more expensive movies.
I always knew I wanted to be an actress, and I had the attitude that I would learn more under people like Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne or Mike Myers than from someone who had never starred in a movie. I just didn't think that someone who had never been in a movie could teach me how to act in one.
The married thing. Sometimes I look at it and feel like someone from a Dickens novel, standing outside in the cold and staring in at Christmas dinner. Relationships hadn't ever really worked for me. I think it's had something to do with all the demons, ghosts, and human sacrifice.
Sometimes, I think I could have been a major movie star with the vast mansion and staff. I look at my Volvo and think it could be a limousine. I think of the roles I turned down. But then I wouldn't have had any children.
Evelyn Waugh: How do you get your main pleasure in life, Sir William? Sir William Beveridge: I get mine trying to leave the world a better place than I found it. Waugh: I get mine spreading alarm and despondency and I get more satisfaction than you do.
I'm sorry, if you've been married for five minutes, you've sacrificed something, you've looked over at your partner and have gone, "Oh my God this is the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life." And then the next moment it's "This is the most beautiful and extraordinary human being, and I'm going to stick with it because I love them more than anyone else." That monologue to me is the universal thing, especially for women because I feel like that's the big thing with women.
I think it worked two ways. One, a lot of people writing about the movie used that as shorthand and it could either be a good thing or they could use it to dismiss the movie like we were a copycat movie or something like that. It's very much its own story. It is a young woman in a post-apocalyptic society, but after that it's just a whole different kind of story and a different journey that she goes through.
I feel it's such a tragic thing [Kurt Cobain's suicide]. Here is a guy, a young guy, that had everything in his hands. He could have had a great life. He had a wife, he had a child, he had a fantastic career. He was important to a generation. And for him to do that - I didn't like that. I thought that was just wrong.
I've never crossed over to be a big star. I'd like to be in a big $100 million movie, though. 'Cause I was in an 'Austin Powers,' I think I had two lines, and every once in a while, I get a check, a really nice check, for that movie.
The first piece of art that I ever bought-when I could afford it-was a Warhol sketch from the period when he was just getting out of doing commercial work and more into art. It's a sketch of a young guy's face. I guess the gallery that I bought it from thought I would like it because the young guy kind of looked like James Dean.
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