A Quote by Eddie Marsan

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.' — © Eddie Marsan
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.'
In the old days when I first was coming up, you would turn up on set in the morning with your coffee, script, and hangover and you would figure out what you were going to do with the day and how you were going to play the scenes. You would rehearse and then invite the crew in to watch the actors go through the scenes. The actors would go away to makeup and costume and the director and the DP would work out how they were going to cover what the actors had just done.
I'm trying to make perfect moments. And those generate meaning. If you go deep enough in how to make a moment, very quickly you come to how narrative works - to what we are as a species, how we've come up with telling stories in scenes and images.
You turn up in the morning, you get through hair and make-up, and then you are on set working until it's time to go home. And I love that. Coming from the theater, you just turn up and you're ready for whatever happens. That energy really appeals to me.
It is a surreal life living on a television series set, and especially when I go out in public. I have people who recognize me and will come up to me, saying how much they enjoy seeing me, asking for a picture, and I still think to myself, "Uh, why?"
I'm an actor, not a writer. I'd be pretty annoyed if the writers tried to come in and hang over my shoulder telling me how to act, so I don't go in and tell them how to write.
A guy playing pool in a pub once said to me that they should put me on the telly. It went in one ear and out the other. But then I started thinking about it. I wondered how it all worked, did you have to be best mates with someone at the BBC who you went to uni with in Oxford?
I don't do a lot of dating. I guess it's kind of like everyone is always trying to set me up with somebody, so we go out and hang out at a club or somewhere. I think dates are weird.
Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.
If I go and buy a coffee, and somebody asks me what I do, I'll say, 'I find asteroids.' And the first thing they always do is make a Bruce Willis joke, or they are going to bring up Armageddon.
There was a period in the Nineties when the BBC wanted to act as if it was a trendy Soho independent. They broke up all sorts of things and got people to work as freelancers who had previously been BBC employees. It corroded a sort of esprit de corps, I think.
We think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit, and of course it is, but for me, the U.S. Marine Corps was a four-year crash course in character education. It taught me how to make a bed, how to do laundry, how to wake up early, how to manage my finances. These are things my community didn't teach me.
If you trust your instincts and it doesn't turn out right, OK. But if you compromise and defer to what somebody else is telling you and it doesn't work out, that feeling gnaws at me.
Turn your nightmares into your dreams , some dreams don't turn out the way you want them to , then wake up and turn and turn it around in your favour.
Characters simply come and find me. They sit down, I offer them a coffee. They tell me their story and then they almost always leave. When a character, after drinking some coffee and briefly telling her story, wants dinner and then a place to sleep and then breakfast and so on, for me the time has come to write the novel.
You've got to be like a fan at your show, just wild out. I make eye contact. I get in the crowd and kick it with 'em, stage dive, mosh. I make 'em laugh. I go out there and turn up, have fun. There's no set list; I don't have rehearsals.
I come up with new ambitions all the time - and the coolest thing is, I think of something I want to do, and I don't really imagine it as "Oh, I've never done that." I think of it as, "Oh, I haven't done that yet." I literally believe I'm going to do everything I set out to do, which is a pretty amazing feeling.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!