Eddie Marsan

“When I first started doing press, one of the things people started pushing was this idea that I'd somehow escaped something. And I was really offended, because I hadn't escaped anything.”

“My business is not to show anybody anything; my job is just to do it.”

“I'm used to playing characters who have a lot to say but don't know how to say it.”

“When I think of character actors, I think of Spencer Tracy; I think of Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall. When I was a young lad watching films, my eyes were on them - watching 'On the Waterfront,' my eyes are on Rod Steiger and Karl Malden, not on Brando.”

“I love the fact that everyone's trying to be good-looking in L.A. - then I turn up and I get work.”

“I know what I try to do. I try to be professional, turn up, not make too much fuss, do the job.”

“When you watch 'Ray Donovan,' you think that it's about Hollywood, about scandal, about stars, and about trying to keep secrets. That's true, but that's also just the means by which you reveal secrets of the people suffering every day life.”

“I've got four kids to feed and a wife to provide for. It's a worry but a great responsibility as well and one I relish.”

“I listen to a lot of jazz. I'm a big Sinatra geek. I love Chet Baker.”

“I always think of Gilbert Norrell as being Salieri to Jonathan Strange being Mozart.”

“I didn't do well at school, and I don't have lots of academic reference points.”

“I was approached to do something for seven years, and it was a quality project. I did seriously think about it, but I didn't want to be away for six months of the year. I've never done the L.A. thing where you go and have loads of meetings; I can't say to my wife, 'I'm going to wait by a pool for six months.'”

“My career is playing the guys who go, 'Boo.' That's what I do.”

“In my family, there was no celebration of ignorance. They'd come and see Chekhov or Shakespeare. I've got a sister who got a first in her degree. We don't sit around watching TV all the time.”

“I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.”

“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.'”

“I come from a place where there's violence and inarticulacy. I worked in a pub from the age of 12 or 13. I used to see people smashing glasses over each other. I was never tough. I was scared of them.”

“The trick to acting is not to show off, it's to think the thoughts of the character.”

“I wasn't that hard. I wasn't that tough. I wasn't that funny - I looked like me.”

“The hardest thing to do and most miserable films are comedies.”