Eddie Marsan is hugging everyone. The waiters. The cooks. Several strangers. We’re in E Pellicci, a café in east London, near to the council flat in which Marsan grew up. He’s been coming here since 1972, when he was four. Pointing at some shiny wood panelling, he says, “My brother-in-law did that polishing.” And at a window: “That’s where they served ice-cream,” gelato-style. Tea arrives at our table, then a bacon sandwich, then a plate of chips Marsan didn’t order – a gift from the kitchen. Asked why he picked this café as a place to meet, he says, “Basically, I thought to myself, Well, if you want to talk to me, we can meet here, because, well, this is my hometown, and it’s still very much a part of my life.”
Marsan, the character actor’s character actor, is 53 now, deep into a chameleonic career that has taken him from east London to Hollywood. He lives in Chiswick – four kids, wife of 20 years, middle-class life – but he still comes back. “I was here the other day to give a eulogy,” he says. A nextdoor neighbour had died. “It’s funny in these flats. Someone fixes your washing machine. Someone else does the painting and decorating. And people think, ‘Oh, Eddie’s an actor, he’ll do the words.’ So I do the words.”
While he eats his sandwich, the café’s owner walks over and asks why Marsan’s come in.
“We’re doing an interview,” Marsan says.
“Oh, are ya?” the owner says. Then, addressing me: “I remember him when he was little. He’s never changed. He’s still the same.”
Marsan frowns.
“I mean, he’s got better looking.”
Though he is capable of remarkable range – of depicting sweethearts as well as terrorists – Marsan is best known for playing serial abusers. Some of his most memorable scenes – in the Paddy Considine drama Tyrannosaur, in which he urinates over Olivia Colman, and in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, in which he plays Sally Hawkins’ furious driving instructor – involve him granting humanity to grotesque men, so that their motivations become comprehensible if not relatable. “If you play someone as blatantly evil,” he says, “that’s not real. Human beings aren’t like that. What’s most interesting is to play someone who does evil things, who makes an audience think: ‘I understand.’ That’s frightening.” During a recent panel discussion, organised to promote his latest project, The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe, an ITV drama, Marsan acknowledged his type-casting. “Toxic masculinity,” he said, letting off a charming HA-HA-HA. “It’s what I do.” Then he listed actresses he’s played opposite in unsettling roles: “Olivia Colman, Shirley Henderson, Sally Hawkins… I’ve abused them all!” (At the café he jokes: “I think there’s a WhatsApp group.”)
In Thief, Marsan plays John Darwin, the real-life former biology teacher who faked his own death to avoid bankruptcy, coercing his wife, Anne, to claim for his life insurance. (You’ll remember the “Canoe Man” headlines.) In the retelling, Anne is played by Monica Dolan. While filming, the pair used lilting northeast accents, even between takes. (At the panel discussion, Marsan joked about Dolan: “This is the first time I’ve heard her speak.”) Thief is another tale of domestic abuse, though the manipulation is more subtle and less physically overt – a gradual seizure of control. In Marsan’s previous projects, including Tyrannosaur, “the character was so extreme, so horrible, that there was a comfort in thinking, ‘That’s not me,’” he says. But recent depictions of abuse have become more nuanced, the evil more difficult to discern, a fog of psychological grey areas. He thinks Thief brings abuse “into the living room”, and wonders whether it might prompt viewers to reassess their own marriages. “I’m being asked to play more parts now where you think, ‘Oh, is that me?” he says. “‘Do I do that? A little bit?’”
Marsan describes Darwin as someone who expected better from life than the middling existence he has achieved, and who is struggling to come to terms with his disillusionment – “an embodiment of what we’re dealing with a lot of men,” he says. When we move on from E Pellicci and find a quieter spot around the corner, I ask him to elaborate. “The thing about men is they’re encouraged to think they can do anything. And reality shows them they can’t, and some men can’t deal with that, and they become deceitful, they become liars and narcissists.” Only now is society beginning to acknowledge the spectrum of human existence, Marsan thinks. “But we’ve been brought up in systems that don’t acknowledge that spectrum. They’ve been binary. Very black and white. And a lot of men have created a narrative for themselves based on that binary way of looking at things, and now they’re having a panic attack.” In short: “The world is changing, and change is difficult, and men are finding it more difficult than women.”
I ask: “How do we fix it?”
“I don’t know whether you can, institutionally,” he says. “You have to confront it.” Then he adds, “Playing John Darwin was interesting because he was someone who lies. And doing that makes you realise that when people lie, they’re thinking you’re not as smart as they are. They think of themselves in 3D and everybody else in 2D.” He brings up Partygate. “I was in post-production for Thief while Boris Johnson was standing in front of parliament. And I thought, ‘You think that you’re three-dimensional and that we’re two-dimensional, and that we can’t see through you.’ That’s a form of narcissism that I think comes from trauma. It’s very human. I think there are some human beings who’ve been so traumatised that they have to believe in narcissism as a way to protect themselves.”
“What kind of trauma?” I ask. He replies, jovially, “I don’t know – I wasn’t there!”
Given how many appalling characters Marsan has played, it’s easy to worry that some of his onscreen behaviour might have tumbled into his real self. It hasn’t. In person he’s genial and considerate of others, and he talks to strangers as though they were family. Sally Hawkins describes Marsan as “pure joy and all heart,” and “an anchor to the earth”. (While filming Happy-Go-Lucky, Marsan “told me off for not having all my admin together,” Hawkins wrote in an email, and then hooked her up with his accountant.) Olivia Colman said, “He’s bloody lovely, and utterly magnetic to watch,” adding “he makes you want to up your game.” Ethan Hawke, who appeared with Marsan in a production of Moby Dick, said, “He’s ferociously honest and clear as an actor and a man” – someone who tries to do what is right. Moby Dick was filmed in Nova Scotia aboard a ship made in the 1860s, and production was tough: terrible food, few places to hide from the wind. “Some actors could get nasty,” Hawke said, but “if someone tried to degrade anyone else, Eddie would let them know a more acceptable path immediately.” At dusk every evening the cast would row themselves back to shore, Hawke recalled, and Marsan “would lead us all in old sea shanties.”
When a woman at E Pellicci tells Marsan she’s recently been accepted into drama school, he pulls her into a hug and says, “I’m proud of you!” (She replies, less ominously than this sounds: “I’m coming for you, Eddie!”) Marsan knows what it means to receive similar news. In his 20s, he applied to several acting courses and was rejected by all of them. When he later snuck on to a programme and began performing Chekhov, he watched bigger parts go to “the good-looking posh boys”, of which he wasn’t one. “I would always play the old fella with gout,” he recalls – along with several other characters simultaneously. “They used to call me Captain Velcro.”
Marsan’s physical appearance – small-ish, barrel-like, with Mr Tumnus ears – has played a significant role in his career. When I ask why he is so often required to play terrible characters, he says, “Someone explained it to me. In Greek theatre, someone who is aesthetically exact was seen as a manifestation of morality and someone like me, who isn’t handsome, who is kind of weird looking, is a manifestation of immorality.” In many of his roles, Marsan plays “the other”, even now he has achieved leading man status. (The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe is narrated by Anne Darwin, not John, becoming her story, and othering him.) “I rarely play ‘us’,” he says, drawing the quotes. “I play the characters who we aren’t. Sometimes, I suspect it’s because the vanity of an audience will be challenged if they have to think they’re me.”
Marsan talks matter-of-factly about the way he looks.
I ask, “Does it bother you?”
“I couldn’t give a…” He stops himself. “My wife’s hot!” he continues, by way of explanation. “I earn a good living. I’m loved. If I was in France I’d be a sex symbol. Some of those actors are ugly bastards.” Sometimes, though, he is forced to confront his appearance. “I did a film with Idris Elba,” he says, referring to the Fast & Furious spin-off Hobbs and Shaw. “I was looking at him and looking at me and thinking, ‘Now there’s a film star.’ Jesus Christ, I needed therapy after that.”
Like Elba, who also grew up in east London, Marsan has been vocal in calling for better opportunities for working-class actors. His upbringing – the way he drops the “e” in the word “terrific” – has impacted the roles he’s been offered as much as his appearance. “Look at the early stuff,” he says. “It was always ‘mugger’ or ‘criminal’, for The Bill or Crime Monthly. That’s all I ever did for years, even though I knew I was better than that, that I was being limited by someone else’s definition of me.” Marsan would like to say he’s escaped prejudice, but he hasn’t. “I’ve just been asked to do a film with a Brazilian director,” he says. “But when I went to see him he said, ‘Well, the people over here told me you’re very working class.’” He spreads his arms as if to ask, What can you do? “He’s been told, ‘That’s what Eddie is,’” he goes on. “That’s what you have to overcome.”
Early in his career, Marsan realised he would need to develop a following in the US, where his class background was less limiting. “I remember doing the second season of Ray Donovan,” he says, of the popular American drama he starred in for several years. “Being there, having the house, going to work with Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight. And my agent called me and said the BBC were doing a production of Richard III with Benedict Cumberbatch, and that they were going to offer me a part. Now, I know Richard III. I’ve toured Europe playing Richard III. And when the offer came through, it was ‘Thief’, with two lines. I thought, But I’m here!” (He declined the role.) “There’s something about this country,” he goes on. “Something about all of us here. We live and breathe these definitions of ourselves. It’s not an ‘us and them’ thing – I don’t buy all that. Some of my best friends are very privileged – great people. But the class system is embedded.”
Marsan repeatedly refers to east London as his “culture”, and he rails against the damaging belief that poor neighbourhoods are only good enough to escape from. “When I started doing interviews, people would ask, ‘How did you get out?’ And I’d say, ‘What makes you think I did?’” It would be understandable if he’d tried. Marsan describes his upbringing as “chaotic”. His parents’ marriage was fraught and it was often unclear if they would stay together. Uncertainty rolled in and out of the family home – “not good for kids,” he says. (Marsan has three older sisters.) When his parents eventually divorced, Marsan briefly became estranged from his father, who was given a restraining order, and he found refuge with a family of St Lucian immigrants that lived nearby, with whom he began to spend his time.
“The people I grew up with, people on the estate, all of us had chaos in our lives,” he says. “A lot of us had fathers with orders not to come anywhere near the house. There was a breakdown of family… But all of us, because of the chaos, we had aspiration. It created a volition in us.” From a place of safety, Marsan began to “question the orthodoxy of the white working class,” he says. Through childhood, his father’s friends would tell him, “You don’t want to hang around with those Black bastards.” He winces. “Well, those ‘Black bastards’ loved me. They literally embraced me.” He goes on, “From a very early age, there were people who told me, ‘You have to be this.’ Initially, it was working-class racists. As I got older it became middle-class casting directors. And there was something in me, as a child, that felt threatened by that, almost to the point that it traumatised me, because it meant I’d lost the ability to define my life, to control my life.”
I ask if he has always played different characters, as a means to escape his upbringing. “No,” he says. “But I was confused.” At 16, he briefly became a born-again Christian. “My mate’s brother showed us a video about the Book of Revelations and we all shit ourselves.” But it didn’t last long. “One day I fell asleep in the back of a coach coming back from Birmingham with them, and I woke up and this bloke who was leading us was saying, ‘OK, next week we’re going to Leicester Square to save homosexuals.’ I remember thinking, ‘Save them from what?’”
Looking back, Marsan believes he had “a bit of a breakdown” after his parents’ divorce. “I had a lot of questions,” he says. One day, he was asked to play an extra in a film shooting in the East End. “I saw Jamie Foreman do a scene, and I thought: I can do that, that’s what I want to do, I want to become an actor.” At the time, Marsan was working in a menswear shop owned by a local man he still refers to, formally, as Mr Bennett. “As soon as I got a job there, people from the area were like, ‘What’s the fiddle? Get me a couple of shirts.’” (The comedian Micky Flanagan, who grew up nearby, recently messaged Marsan: “Eddie, I’ve got a jumper I bought from you in 1984. Never worn it. Can I get a credit note?”) Marsan describes Bennett as “an incredibly moral man” and a father figure who “kind of changed my life”. When he told Bennett he wanted to become an actor, Bennett offered to pay for his drama school fees; without the money he couldn’t have afforded to go. Marsan eventually asked Bennett to be the best man at his wedding, but “the night before he had a stroke, collapsed, and smashed the side of his face.” Marsan followed the ambulance to the hospital. When they arrived, a doctor said, “‘He’s 82, his heart’s OK, he’ll survive, but we’ve had to put a plate in his face.’ Then they wheeled him in on a trolley. And he sits up and looks at me and says, ‘Eddie, I’d do anything to get out of making a speech!’”
Bennett died while Marsan was shooting Moby Dick. (Hawke, on hearing the news, “just sat with me, didn’t say anything, while I cried,” Marsan recalls. Hawke said: “I remember him suffering. Zero self pity.”) The family knew it was coming. “My wife said to me, ‘You have to go and see him before you go.’ So I drove to the hospital and I went in, and he was laying there in bed, and I held his hand and said, ‘I love you. I owe you everything. For my family, my career, the house, the mortgage, the debt, the ulcers, everything.’ And he was laughing. He was a very funny man – we laughed all the time.” He died a week later.
I ask what would have happened if they hadn’t met, if Mr Bennett hadn’t paid for Marsan to study acting.
“I think I would have suffered incredible depression” he says. “Incredible depression.”
“You would have been unfulfilled,” I say.
He nods, then says: “Unfulfilled.”
The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe is on ITV and ITV Hub later this month
Stylist Hope Lawrie; production by Laird & Good Company; director of photography Martin Roach; digital technician Claudia Gschwend; lighting assistant Philip Banks; grooming by Tara Hickman using Benny Hancock for Men; shot on location at Perseverance Works