‘Mitch Winehouse told me he’d made mistakes’
Fresh from playing Amy Winehouse’s father in Back to Black, Eddie Marsan talks about his new role as a US president opposite Michael Douglas.
At drama school they called Eddie Marsan “Captain Velcro’’, he says, “because I used to play all the small parts and do the quick changes’’. That versatility and lack of ego have helped to make him one of the finest character actors in the world. Marsan’s nuanced, unshowy work has elevated films by Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York), Steven Spielberg (Warhorse), Terrence Malick (The New World), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (21 Grams) and
Mike Leigh (Vera Drake). In bigger roles – the abusive husband in Tyrannosaur, the former boxer in the US series Ray Donovan and the ratty driving instructor in Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky – he is unforgettable.
You want range? Marsan can now be seen as Mitch Winehouse, the cab-driving dad of Amy, in Back to Black, and John Adams, a founding father and the second president of the United States, in the Franklin mini-series. That’s two continents and 250 years of range.
In Franklin he butts heads with Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin – Adams and Franklin loathed each other. The eight-part Apple TV+ series dramatises Franklin’s time from 1776-85 in Paris, where the polymath charms high society in an attempt to persuade the French to support America in the war for independence.
Adams is sent to work with Franklin in Paris, where he plays glowering roundhead to the older man’s urbane cavalier. ‘‘The art here is to achieve much while appearing to achieve little,’’ Franklin says. ‘‘An art which you seem to have mastered,’’ Adams replies.
“They’re like the odd couple: can’t stand each other but they both get the job done,’’ Marsan says, talking in a restaurant around the corner from his home in west London.
“Franklin embodies the libertarian aspect of the American psyche and Adams embodies the puritanical side.’’
Adams gets some good lines though, referring to the French navy as “the greatest lot of seaborne chuckleheads I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter’’.
“I loved the language,’’ Marsan says. “I usually play inarticulate, you know ...’’ Bastards? I think of his character in Tyrannosaur, who urinated on his wife, played by Olivia Colman.
Adams was a more decent sort, and Marsan had been set to play him in the noughties HBO series John Adams until it fell through. The role ended up going to his friend Paul Giamatti, whom he had urged to do it. “And he was amazing and won the Emmy,’’ he says without a hint of envy.
Douglas beguiled his co-stars on the show, as Franklin did the frilly mesdames of Paris. Marsan and his fellow Londoner Daniel Mays, who plays Edward Bancroft, an American ally of Franklin’s, would say that there was a time in every scene, “no matter how much he was in character, where you went: ‘F...ing hell, it’s Michael Douglas!’ He’s got these absolutely seductive blue eyes.’’ Plus passable French.
Yet there was no attempt to steal scenes. “He has a beautiful efficiency, does exactly what he needs to do. It takes incredible confidence to not want to show off. He knows you’ll be nervous, and did everything he could to make you feel comfortable. He put on a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner for everybody.’’
Mitch Winehouse was closer to home, literally: Marsan went to school two streets from where he was born in working-class east London. “When I first met him he said: ‘Oh hello, another Stepney boy’.’’
They spent a few afternoons together, eating, drinking and chatting. “He’s much more self-aware and candid than he’s perceived. He talked about the experience of having a daughter who was an addict and one of the most famous women in the world, and with every drug dealer in London wanting to give her drugs. He told me he’d made mistakes – he’d be: ‘What could I have done differently?’
“But one thing I did realise is, the family did nine interventions. They tried to get help. My daughter’s 19 – if she was famous with that much money and a habit, I don’t know if I could help her.’’
Heartbreakingly, Winehouse died after a long period of sobriety. “Mitch showed me a photograph taken two weeks before she died, and she’s so healthy – she’d put on weight.’’ Yet her heart had been damaged by bulimia as well as drugs. “Then Mitch went to New York and she had a binge session and her heart gave out.’’
He is full of admiration for Marisa Abela, who plays Amy. “Poor Marisa – we’d have supporting artists playing paparazzi, but then real paparazzi would sneak in and take photographs of us doing the scene. By the time we got back, those photographs were online and people were making nasty comments. Every day she had to dig deep and go: ‘OK, I’m going to keep on doing this’.’’
Marsan grew up in Bethnal Green, east London, the son of a lorry driver and a school dinner lady and teaching assistant. “My mum was amazing, but my parents had a difficult marriage,’’ he says. He spent much of his childhood with a St Lucian friend and his parents, who became his surrogate family. “I’m getting emotional now, but it’s part of the benefit of a diverse community,’’ he says. “I honestly owe everything to it.’’
Not that life was a waltz. “There was an undercurrent of violence,’’ he says. “Lots of people I knew were stabbed, beaten up. I got beaten up a few times.’’
He now lives at the posh end of town with his wife, the makeup artist Janine Schneider, and their four teenagers. “I wouldn’t like my kids to go through what we saw.’’ Yet he is understanding. “There’s no such thing as evil people, there’s just unhappy people in difficult circumstances.’’
After training as a printer Marsan went to drama school thanks to the kindness of Les Bennett, whose menswear shop he worked in. “He paid for me to go. He was like a father figure to me – he changed my life.’’
Even after training as an actor Marsan suffered from typecasting. “If you look at my early career it was just ‘drug dealer, mugger’ and I thought: ‘Sod this for a game of soldiers’.’’ What changed? “We did Vera Drake and 21 Grams in the space of a year. That gave me a career in America as a character actor and a career here.’’ He often uses ‘‘we’’’ instead of ‘‘I’’, but not in the royal sense – he’s just collaborative to his bones.
Coming up he has Lockerbie, about the 1988 bombing of a plane by Libyan terrorists. “I play an FBI bomb expert from Kentucky, and Peter Mullan and Tony Curran, my mates, play Scottish detectives.’’
There’s Midas Man, a film in which he plays the father of the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, and King and Conquering, a series that casts him as Edward the Confessor, with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from Game of Thrones as William the Conqueror. “Edward is the most asexual man, and absolutely terrified. I love it.’’
So the variety continues for Captain Velcro. On Franklin, he and Mays looked at each other in their wigs and face powder and noted how they ‘‘could easily have just been playing professional Cockneys’’. The best thing about his job now, Marsan says, is ‘‘no-one pays me to be me’’. – The Times