Rumble in the jungle
You might not know the name but you will certainly know the face. Eddie Marsan chats to Donal O’Donoghue
Eddie Marsan grew up in East London, “a place of violence and inarticulacy” as he puts it. “A bit lost” as a teenager, he became a Christian at 15 following his parents’ divorce. After six months he bailed, (“the people there were very manipulative”) and on his 16th birthday started working in a menswear shop. The owner, Mr Bennett, who would become a close friend, helped to pay for an evening acting course for Eddie, which became his launch pad to a life in acting.
Today, Marsan lives in London with his wife, make-up artist Janine Schneider and their four children, but does most of his work on the other side of the Atlantic, notably as an ex-boxer with Parkinson’s disease in Ray Donovan. One of the finest actors on the circuit, he has won awards for Vera Drake and Happy-Go-Lucky and can pop up anywhere from Deadpool 2 to Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle and the upcoming big-screen drama, Vice.
What did you bring of fatherhood to your performance as Vihaan in Mowgli?
It’s about trying to find the right words to say to inspire kids and that is also Vihaan’s relationship with Mowgli. What I love about the film are the issues that Mowgli is facing, a sense of belonging and trying to find oneself, which is something that kids go through every day. As a father myself I know this rollercoaster ride.
A drama teacher of yours once said that the trick is to have an ordinary life and an extraordinary career. How is that going, Eddie?
Hahaha! The hardest thing as a professional actor is to marry the kind of ‘circus-life’ that you lead with your family life. I worked with Philip Seymour Hoffman six weeks before he died on a film called God’s Pocket. We talked a lot about the logistics of spending time with our families and how difficult that is. The way I do it is that I don’t have a social life. I just work and travel home and then I’m with the wife and kids.
What motivates you to leave home?
I don’t really have a career in the UK as much as I have one in America. I tried to have a career in the UK, but after Ray Donovan there is more work and more diverse work for me in the US. If I stayed in the UK I fear my career would not be as diverse, and I would be pigeonholed. In America they think I can do anything.
Didn’t the BBC give you a two-line piece as a thief in their production of Richard III?
Yeah. I have played Richard II, toured Europe playing him on stage. So I’m in the US when my agent phoned me to say that I was going to be offered a part in the BBC adaptation. And I thought ‘Oh great! What part I wonder? Benedict (Cumberbatch) is playing Richard so maybe it’s Buckingham?’ Then I heard it was two lines as a thief and thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’”
How do you think your East End upbringing has shaped your life and career?
There was a certain amount of chaos on the estate where I grew up, especially within marriages. Yet a lot of us have all done quite well. Looking back now, I believe that it’s because we all wanted control of our lives. In many ways, my desire as an actor to always ask questions came from that survival instinct. The first orthodoxy I rejected was white working-class racism. I rejected that early on because most of my friends were black or Asian or emigrants. So when you reject one orthodoxy at a young age, you start to question all orthodoxies and I was doing that long before I became an actor. I believe it has served me well as an actor.