Interview with Eddie Marsan

It seems absurd when Eddie Marsan says: "Nobody wants to look like me." In the west London cafe where we meet, the actor sports a red-check shirt, wild curls and a ruddy face thicketed with beard, grown to order for a tough-nut Irishman part. He looks ordinary, if interesting, and at close range he watches piercingly.

Marsan's comment comes in the middle of a discussion about the strange, harsh world of Los Angeles, the city he lives in for half the year, filming Showtime's cable series Ray Donovan (he plays Ray's brother Terry opposite Liev Schreiber). Though he doesn't like its west coast heat - "something about it makes me feel nauseous" - Hollywood and its high bodily ideals suit his purpose.

"I love the fact that everyone's trying to be good-looking in LA - then I turn up and I get work," he says with a grin. "There's only me and two other blokes going for all the jobs. It's to my advantage." He then reflects: "If I were a French actor, I'd be a sex symbol, I'd be really hot in a Gerard Depardieu kind of way. Only kidding." But maybe he's right; Marsan does sparkle.

The "other blokes" - he mentions Toby Jones, Paul Giamatti, John C Reilly - have, like Marsan, built a reputation for searching the dark, awkward and unloved recesses of the male mind. Each of Marsan's performances delivers a heavy hammer strike of emotion: the paranoid driving instructor in Happy Go Lucky; the manic debt collector Mr Pancks in Little Dorrit; the grieving father in Southcliffe; the repugnant husband in Tyrannosaur, to name a handful. You can never get too comfortable watching him; he can shock all too easily.

"At drama school [London's Mountview Academy], I always used to play the old guy with gout in a Chekhov play, and someone else would play the sexy guy who shot himself at the end," Marsan jokes. "I'm used to playing characters who have a lot to say but don't know how to say it. When I did [Mike Leigh's] Vera Drake, Reg [his character] was thinking so many things but he said them in monosyllabic responses."

Terry Donovan is another silent type. "The characters in Ray Donovan are not very articulate - we're the worst Irish family you could ever live next to in LA. We've been abused by Catholic priests, we kill people left, right and centre. We can't express the pain and suffering we've gone through." No wonder that he wouldn't mind a shot at Iago or Harry Truman for some slicker talking in the future.

Marsan's next big role is in the BBC's adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, the best-selling novel by Susanna Clarke that portrays a 19th-century England beset by magic. Does practical rather than theoretical magic really exist? And, if so, to what end should it be used? Marsan's character, Mr Norrell, is the rich but hermitic northerner whose fussy obsession with magic eventually enables him to practise it - but at a grave cost. Strange, meanwhile, is a bumptious, entitled counterpoint (played by Bertie Carvel), who discovers an easy gift for magic and uses it to chase love.

"Magic symbolises the subconscious - that part of us that is creative and powerful that we sometimes don't tap into. Norrell accesses it from a very anally retentive part of himself. Strange taps into it from a spontaneous confidence. Everything is precarious to Norrell; his ability to do magic is like a flame that could go out at any moment. Being someone who tries to be creative in my profession, that's something I understand - there's days when I'm Norrell and days when I'm Strange."

There's a wonderful scene in the first episode where rumours of Norrell's powers have worked up a froth of expectation at a crowded London society party. Norrell's horror at the vulgarity of it all is captured by Marsan with a rabbity, twitching anxiety; you feel for this essentially silly character in spite of his shortcomings. "Good actors play human beings as they really are," Marsan says. "Self-awareness is the main thing, you have to be brutally honest with yourself. Norrell is an outsider and part of me is an outsider too. Norrell doesn't quite fit into cosmopolitan London society, doesn't know his ps and qs - there's part of me that's been that too; people from a different background have this innate confidence that I never had. I had determination."

. . .

Born in Stepney, he grew up in Bethnal Green, and left school with no qualifications: "I realised I was intelligent but I'd let myself down." He served an apprenticeship as a printer but was very unhappy, and went through a period of isolation that he came to draw on later in his acting. When a friend led him to be a film extra, his imagination was caught immediately: "When I got to the film set I thought, 'This is where I want to work.' It felt like a meritocracy: if you can act, you'll work. Plus there were lots of girls on the set." He is now married to make-up artist Janine Schneider, and the couple have four children under 10. Marsan tries to "take on the chaos" himself so that his family isn't disrupted by his work; he says his agents are "quite relieved to have an actor whose issues are complications of family life. Rather than rehab or divorces."

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"It's not only a class thing, I had no academic training. Early on in my career I had to play Albert Camus'sCaligula; my sister had a degree in French so she had to come round and explain existentialism to me in an afternoon. How can I understand this enough to hold a character on stage for two hours? My education as an actor started like that." He served his time through Casualty, The Bill, Silent Witness and other TV standards before bigger parts started to come his way. "I didn't earn a living as an actor until I was in my thirties."

Marsan is emphatic that people tend to patronise working-class life: "Bethnal Green was a great place to grow up. The narrative that people tried to create for me was that I'd somehow escaped something and was somehow an exception. The truth of the matter is that some people I grew up with are doing exceptionally well.

"The danger of making films about the working class is that, one, you demonise them; and, two, you disempower them. Film-makers go to a council estate and make a film in which everyone is dysfunctional, almost like a Hogarth painting, and the camera finds one person to rescue." He bristles: "When you come from a council estate, you go 'hang on a minute': 90 per cent of people on the estate are working hard, their houses are spotless. When I went to drama school, I was the smartest one - I wore a shirt and tie."

Now 46, Marsan is in a position to be picky about his roles. Though it had the added bonus of being filmed in the UK, the Mr Norrell project attracted him as it "symbolised the ambition of television. When I did Little Dorrit [in 2008], they were thinking about it in half-hour excerpts as they thought the attention span of the general public would be as if they were watching EastEnders. Now you can create 12-hour box sets. That appealed to me and I learnt that new artform doing Ray Donovan; I suddenly became aware of the rhythm and structure of these things. When the BBC sent me this, I thought it's riding the crest of that wave of the confidence of television."

And what of the steady erosion of in-house BBC drama production? Marsan isn't too concerned: "We have great writers here." He points out: "Television is in a really great position where the protagonists don't have to be sympathetic any more." Mr Norrell is a co-production with BBC America and Endemol: "They're creating things that will sell."

With Marsan's astuteness, you can't help but wonder when he will get behind the camera to direct. He says he is considering an adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III. "One of the reasons I haven't done it now is that my youngest has just gone to school. I have to get the children up and running and then I'll do it. I've always had healthy horizons. Don't rush, I know I can do it."

'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell' begins on BBC One later this month

Portrait by Carl Bigmore

Grooming by Joe Mills

Photograph: BBC

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