When people approach Eddie Marsan in public, they do a wobbly two-step: forwards, in recognition, and backwards, unsure. They know his face, but where is it from? “I’m not really a celebrity; I’m never me. So it takes some time to work it out, I think,” he says, grinning ear to ear on a video call from his home office. He’s been in more than 150 films and TV shows to date, so it’s no surprise people find themselves stumped by the man before them.
The cheery 56-year-old Londoner was almost pigeonholed as a professional Cockney, but after fighting to break out of typecasting, he became widely admired as a character actor – an actor who can play any character. The uninitiated would assume that’s just what an actor is. Not always, Marsan has concluded after decades in the business. “Some people want to be famous rather than be an actor. They think they love acting, but they love the idea of fame more. That never appealed to me – not because of any great moral strength on my part. My whole purpose in life was to earn a living as an actor, and the best way to do that was to be as versatile as possible.”
How has someone as physically distinctive as Marsan pulled it off, I wonder. He drops his H’s and T’s, then tail-ends sentences with “D’you know what I mean?” His wide face is singular, framed with small ears like little equilateral triangles.
As Marsan speaks to me, I suddenly recognise him from dark, nasty, extreme movies like Gangster No 1 (2000) and Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur (2011) – I notice it every time a storm brews in his face, when he talks about something sad (his parents’ divorce) or fury-making (politics, mostly). You can see how he’s ended up playing so many violent men. “I’ve acted with the best character actresses in this country. I’m sure there’s a WhatsApp support group, because I’ve been an abusive husband to all of them,” he jokes at one point in our conversation.
But then, his face has a unique shapeshifting quality; in a flash he breaks out into a bright impish smile, eyes sparkling. As he jumps from serious argument to punchline, he has a lightness of presentation, an elasticity of spirit, which has helped him build a career more versatile than almost anyone working today.
In the first episode of new BBC drama series The Bombing of Pan Am 103, he’s completely disguised as FBI investigator Tom Thurman, moustachioed visage locked in concern as a piece of information clicks: “I think someone bombed that plane out of the sky,” he tells a colleague, in a thick Kentucky drawl.
One month, Marsan is powder-wigged and booted up as the second US president, John Adams (Franklin); the next he’s Brian Epstein’s Liverpudlian-Jewish dad in a biopic of the Beatles manager (Midas Man). Then he’s an enigmatic hunter (via Rapman’s sci-fi superhero series Supacell). Yes, Marsan was busy in 2024, but he’s that busy every year.
It was a turning point in his career when he starred in Mike Leigh’s beloved films Vera Drake (2004) and Happy-Go-Lucky (2008); the director introduced him to the right people, gave him the weighty roles he craved. “When you’re acting – it’s probably [the same] within journalism, within any creative process – there’s always a temptation to be clever, isn’t there?” he says with a half-wink. “What I learned from Mike was, just be honest. Don’t show off.”
The next pivotal moment was landing a lead role in Showtime’s TV drama Ray Donovan, as Terry, a former boxer suffering from Parkinson’s disease. This helped Marsan build his reputation in America, something he realised he had to do to diversify his roles. “British filmmakers and TV companies were offering me terrible parts based on my class, so I had to step away from them,” he remembers. “American filmmakers had a more flexible idea of me.”
Marsan grew up in Bethnal Green, east London, in the Seventies. Think council estates, funk and soul music, a multitude of religious and cultural backgrounds. “There’s different forms of privilege. I didn’t grow up with a financially privileged upbringing, but the council estate I lived in, in [the borough of] Tower Hamlets, was culturally very privileged because we were so diverse,” he says.
Less fortunately, family life was chaotic, with Marsan’s parents locked in a volatile and painfully slow divorce while he was between the ages of 12 and 16. During those years, he became close with a local St Lucian family: Emmanuel, a man Marsan now calls his brother, who was a few years older than him, and Emmanuel’s mother, Joyce, whom he now calls “Mum” (noting that his own mother died six years ago). Joyce and Emmanuel’s home was a “refuge” with an open-door policy.
During this period, another of Marsan’s St Lucian friends became a born-again Pentecostal Christian. “If I look back at it now, at the age of 16 I should have been smoking spliffs and running around doing rebellious things. But because my preceding years were chaotic, I looked for order when I was 16. So I became a born-again Christian,” says Marsan.
After about 10 months, “it became too fundamentalist for me and I had a kind of breakdown”, he recalls. “I remember being in a van coming back from a church in Birmingham, and hearing them say, ‘We’re going to go to Leicester Square to save homosexuals.’ I said, ‘Save them from what?’” Inevitably, the notion was that God could “save” these people from being gay. Nowadays, Marsan doesn’t believe in a man in the sky, but calls himself a humanist: someone who finds value in the way that you treat people on this earth, in community, and in nature.
After his experience with such a restrictive ideology, he finds himself happiest in grey-area thinking. “I’ve always had an aversion to extremism. Your job as an actor is to embrace the paradoxical nature of life and [in] every character you play... That’s affected the way I view things philosophically, and politically, and economically.”
In the 2010s, Marsan was an active user of Twitter (before it was X), sharing opinions that line up with that aversion. When far-right activist Tommy Robinson talked about representing the white working class, Marsan couldn’t hack it: “I wasn’t trying to be a famous actor being lairy – to be honest, I forgot that I was famous,” he says, adding that he replied publicly to Robinson saying something along the lines of: “You haven’t got the f***ing intelligence to represent me.”
Marsan smiles at the memory. “When people used to write to me and say horrible things, like a troll, I would just tell them to f*** off. I got a publicist and she said, ‘You can’t do that, you have to be above it.’ I said, ‘Well, I just want to tell them to f*** off.’”
He’s left X now: since Elon Musk took over, he says, it has become “a cesspit of mainly extremist right-wing views”. But not before making use of it as a tool: Marsan was a vocal detractor of both Jeremy Corbyn (he agreed with his economics, less so with the way he dealt with accusations of antisemitism within his party) and the right. Today he believes that Keir Starmer’s Labour could engage undecided working-class voters by helping them with the essentials: “Basically, tax people like me more, give more money to the NHS, create more social housing, and those 25 per cent that are on the fence won’t feel threatened.”
Why attempt to speak to, or try to understand, the other 25 per cent that are leaning ever harder into the Reform party and other far right affiliations? Marsan grew up with the British National Party and the National Front marching down Bethnal Green Road, near to where he grew up, so he understands right-wing psychology.
“You are never gonna satisfy racists – it’s their hobby, they’re addicted to it,” he says. “They define themselves by othering other people: ‘I define myself because I am not Pakistani, I define myself because I’m not Jewish, I define myself because I’m not Black’ – there’s nothing you can do that will satiate them. Nothing at all. So tell them to f*** off.” With this, he leans into the camera, swamping it, and grins again.
Even opinions as well informed as these can cause him problems. “I always get in trouble, because I don’t please anyone. One of my big curses in life is to see both sides of an argument,” he says playfully, adding that – while seeing people being othered for their ethnicity or culture is what he hates the most – “Class was the thing that I found hard to navigate.”
That was the past, and he has now settled into a comfortable life with his four kids and his wife of 20 years in Chiswick. I wonder what he makes of the “nepo baby” discourse of the last couple of years. Two of his children are interested in the film and TV industry, with his eldest daughter at King’s College London studying film; he tells them that, if they do end up working in the trade, they should “just work twice as hard and be twice as nice”.
When Marsan himself was 15, working temporarily as a mate to his lorry-driver dad, he says, “no one complained about me being a nepo baby then... You can’t judge people because their parents were actors or in the industry. All you can do is guarantee that there’s opportunities for people who don’t have advantages. But you can’t deny people the inspiration to go into a profession if they’ve grown up on film sets.”
His children indeed grew up watching him act. During the years when Marsan was in Ray Donovan, they orbited his role, moving between Los Angeles and London as a family, before Marsan began doing the monumental commute between the two cities every weekend – something he continued for years. The sacrifice was worth it: the UK film and TV industry took note and offered better roles (“They saw me as an actor, not as a professional copy”).
One of those parts was Mitch Winehouse in the mostly panned Back to Black, a fictional film about the life of Amy Winehouse, which was aided enormously by Marsan’s charming take on the controversial figure. Marsan had researched the man before playing him, speaking to Mitch himself as well as some of Amy’s friends and family, and is wary of those who criticise her father or suggest he played a part in her downfall.
“I don’t have an addictive personality, but I have very close friends in AA and NA. They tell me that in 30, 40 years of going to meetings, they’ve never heard one person say, ‘I stopped drinking because my [parent] told me to.’ It doesn’t exist.”
Another such opportunity has been his newest role, in The Bombing of Pan Am 103. Though the 1988 Lockerbie disaster is well-trodden historical material and has been dramatised before (it was only in January this year that Colin Firth starred in Sky Atlantic’s Lockerbie: A Search for Truth), the script attracted Marsan for the way it was less about the horror, more about the collective response to the bombing.
“That’s the inspiring thing about the [show], and that’s what made me want to do it, really. You got such a great ensemble cast because it was an ensemble response to a problem,” he remarks, adding that he met the real Thurman to study him for the role.
Marsan’s long-term focus is now his production company, which he runs with his wife, Janine Schneider-Marsan, who writes and sources material. While Marsan is still offered brilliant parts in his mid-fifties, his wife brings to his attention the lack of interesting roles for his female counterparts, who often find themselves aged out of the industry.
“A lot of actors are employed because of their youth and attractiveness, y’know? I’ve never benefited. I’ve got a face like a smacked arse,” he says. “So [we write] for character actors, whether they’re male or female. Whenever people ask who’s the best actor in the country, they always mention men. They always say ‘Daniel Day-Lewis’ or ‘Gary Oldman’, and I think, ‘Well, why aren’t you mentioning Imelda Staunton? She’s amazing.’”
Now that Marsan’s children are older, directing is in his near future. What an exciting challenge to take on such a macro role, I suggest, to a shrug from Marsan. “If you’d spent as much time doing my job as I have, you could do it. There’s no big mystery. It’s not about me and my ability; it’s just I’ve been around film sets for 30 years. I’d be an idiot if I couldn’t direct now, to be honest with you.”
This blank canvas of a man has been so many people in so many places, but he hasn’t related psychologically to any of his roles – not really. “I think the closest was probably Terry Donovan, and he was a Boston guy with Parkinson’s,” Marsan smiles. He’s more like a notable painter than a real celebrity, he concludes. “If people see me, it’s like they’re looking at different paintings that I’ve painted. D’you know what I mean?”
‘The Bombing of Pan Am 103’ continues on BBC iPlayer and BBC One from 9pm, Sunday 25 May. The first two episodes are available on BBC iPlayer now
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