All hail King Eddie
One of Britain’s most prolific and varied actors, Eddie Marsan discusses his desire for diversity in the parts he chooses, why he doesn’t want to be a celebrity and how he got into character to play King Edward in BBC drama King & Conqueror.
When it comes to picking up roles across film and television, Eddie Marsan craves diversity. That much is clear from a browse of his recent credits, which include playing an 11th century English monarch in historical drama King & Conqueror, an FBI agent investigating the Lockerbie disaster in The Bombing of Pan Am 103 and a retired police officer with a dark secret in revenge thriller Reunion – and that’s just the shows that have aired this year.
Best known for film roles in Happy-Go-Lucky, Vera Drake and The World’s End, he’s also starred in series such as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Ray Donovan, Ridley Road and The Thief, His Wife & the Canoe.
He’s now due to visit Middle-earth in the third season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and is returning for the second season of Netflix superhero drama Supacell.
“I want to be diverse. I want to be as diverse as possible,” Marsan tells DQ. Very early on in his career, he says he came under pressure to become a “professional cockney,” having grown up in Bethnal Green, East London. “But I pushed against that. I wanted to be an actor. I didn’t want to be a very comfortable caricature of what people think I am, because it’s always based on their preconceived ideas. It’s not based on what I really am.
“I’ve always felt that would have been a disservice, not only to me, but to the people I grew up with, because the people I grew up with are really bright, intelligent people. We are colloquial. We do have slang and all that, but we don’t eff and blind all the time. And friends of mine, their children write novels, they’re musicians, they’re really bright, and I always think I’ve always avoided becoming this caricature cockney. So my job, when I wanted to become an actor, was to play as diverse a range of characters as possible, and not to let other people define me.”
Marsan admits that proved to be difficult at first. But in the same year he filmed Vera Drake, Mike Leigh’s 1950s-set abortion drama, he travelled to the US to partner with Alejandro G Iñárritu on 21 Grams, which charts how a fatal traffic accident changes the lives of a severely ill mathematician, an ex-convict and a grief-stricken mother.
“So that gave me a career both in the UK and America, and I always found that America had much more of an open idea of me,” Marsan says. “They thought I could play anything; the British wanted to define me. So I went over there and I did Ray Donovan, and did some big American movies. Then when I came back here [to the UK], because my wife and kids were here, then the British suddenly said, ‘OK, we’ve got more of an open mind here.’”
The actor starred alongside Liev Schreiber in Ray Donovan, Showtime’s drama about a professional fixer in LA, which ran for seven seasons from 2013 and concluded with a feature film in 2022. Marsan played Ray’s older brother Terry, a former boxer suffering with Parkinson’s disease.
That Marsan had to go to LA to make his name in his home country is down to the class system in the UK, he says. “That’s what it is.” Now looking to the next generation of working-class actors looking to break into the acting business, he doesn’t see opportunities getting any better.
“It may be going backwards, in many ways, because it’s harder to go into the industry now. To start in the industry without financial backing is really hard,” he says.
Whatever role he takes on, adopting a new character or persona is all part of the job for Marsan, who “has never been me” on screen. “Therefore, I’m always asked to be someone else, and that means I’m not a celebrity in that sense, because I’m not a commodity. I’m not a commodity like you can go, ‘That’s what he is.’ People have not got any idea who I am, which is quite nice. It allows me to have a bit of a private life.”
It means when the actor is recognised in public, it’s often for a range of different parts, from Happy-Go-Lucky and Ray Donovan to Will Smith-led superhero film Hancock. “The best way I can describe it is it’s like being a painter and I have different paintings I’ve painted, but they don’t know the painter,” he says.
“I just think if you’re an actor, you should explore all human existence. The golden phrase of acting is that ‘nothing human is alien to me.’ So that’s what you do. You explore all different aspects of humanity. It’s not an exercise in narcissism, it’s an exercise in empathy.”
But whoever he is playing, the process of getting into character tends to stay the same. Having trained with acting coach Sam Kogan at drama school and then with John Hughes for several years, he was taught to act like “a mechanic fixes a car” with a toolbox full of skills to tackle any character.
“And to be honest with you,” Marsan says, “I’ve used his method of approaching a character for everything, and it’s not self-indulgent. If I’m doing a physicality like in Ray Donovan, I would keep the Parkinson’s going all the time, or I would keep the accent going all the time. But that’s just because by the time the camera rolls, I don’t want to be thinking about that. That’s a given condition about a character. So I want to think about the psychological context they’re living in. I do that so it becomes second nature. Then I can think about the immediate context of what I’m doing in the scene.”
Sometimes, he admits, he also gets his accents wrong, but is grateful to the support of the local cast to help him – a kindness he is also only too happy to reciprocate. “I’ve just done a job in Ireland with Éanna Hardwicke, playing a Northern Irish bank manager with a Northern Irish crew, and they helped me,” he says of upcoming movie No Ordinary Heist. “I did The Pact for the BBC and played a Welshman with the mainly Welsh cast. I go in and say, ‘Listen, guys, can you help me? I’ve got to play Welsh. Can you correct me if you think I’m getting it wrong?’ And actors are lovely. They will help anyone. I did it for Sam Rockwell – he was playing a British detective and he contacted me and said could I do recordings for him so he could get it. Actors help actors.”
His latest role sees him play King Edward – also known as Edward the Confessor – in King & Conqueror, an epic retelling of the relationship between Harold of Wessex (James Norton) and William of Normandy (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and the events that led to the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Currently airing on the BBC, it is produced by Rabbit Track Pictures, CBS Studios, RVK Studios, The Development Partnership and Shepherd Content. Paramount Global Content Distribution has also sold the series into more than 100 territories worldwide.
The eight-part series sees the god-fearing, cowardly and childlike Edward ascend to the throne. But under the control of his mother, Lady Emma (Juliet Stevenson), he claims Wessex for the Crown, exiles Harold and his ruling family, and anoints William as his successor – paving the way for the rivalry between Harold and William that will lead to a legendary battle.
It was in Edward’s religious beliefs that Marsan found his performance for the character, building on his own experiences as a born-again Christian as a teenager. “My parents went through a very bad divorce, so at the age of 16, when I should have been smoking weed or nicking cars, I became a born-again Christian, because my parents’ divorce was very difficult and I needed order,” he explains. “I stopped that after about nine months – I’m a humanist now – so I’ve always found the need for religious belief, the need for that narrative, fascinating, and I have great empathy for people and why they need that. I don’t believe it, but I understand it.”
What he found also fascinating about Edward was that he is a man of “incredible faith and incredible fear.” “All great characters are paradoxical,” he notes, “and holding that paradox was what got me through it, really. That’s due to the writing, more than anything else.”
Filming King & Conqueror in Iceland, Marsan was able to build a scene-stealing double act with Stevenson as the manipulative Lady Emma. “It’s a very fraught mother-and-son relationship, let’s put it that way,” he says, “which historically it was as well. He’s really a man who wasn’t assertive. He didn’t make a choice. He left the chaos that ensues with Harold and William. He’s the one who left that mess, really, for them to fight over. That’s because he’s a man who can’t be assertive because the main thing he has is fear. He’s a very scared character.”
To land the role, Marsan was sent the scripts and simply asked if he would like to do it. He had never worked with Norton before, but was a “big admirer,” while Coster-Waldau is an “old friend.” He was also thrilled to learn Coster-Waldau would be directing for the first time on episode five. “That would be fascinating for me, to be with him and to be directed by someone I have known for a while. I trust him, so I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’
“At the same time, I knew I was doing Lockerbie and Reunion, so I knew I was playing a guy from Kentucky and a guy from Sheffield. ‘Yeah, all right, let’s put Edward the Confessor in the mixer.’ I do literally think like that.”
It’s a typical example of the varied roles Marsan has juggled throughout his career, making him stand out from the acting crowd and avoiding the typecasting facing some of his peers. “Famous actors are personalities,” he says. “We are so obsessed by celebrity at the moment, and ‘celebrity’ means that [famous] actors have to play the same part all the time. I’m not a celebrity, I’m an actor, and I’m really proud of being an actor, and I’m just one of hundreds of thousands of actors in this country. I love acting. I hate being a fucking celebrity. It makes no sense to me. My job is to be an actor, not a celebrity. I’m just doing what I know all my friends are doing. It’s just that they’re not in the public eye.”
Marsan also believes that if people can define you as an actor, “they can get sick of you.” Therefore, “if they can’t define you, they can’t get sick of you,” he says. “I love diversity. I love it. I can’t stand people asking me to do the same thing again and again.”
He adds: “It means you won’t have that moment where everyone thinks you’re marvellous and, ‘Oh my God, he’s the next big thing,’ because I’m not. I’m just a jobbing actor, but as long as I’m good at my job, then I can keep working.”
Like King & Conqueror? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Game of Thrones: Noble families vie for dominance over the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, where every alliance is fragile and every ambition deadly.
The Tudors: King Henry VIII navigates a realm torn by sexual intrigue, political machinations and religious upheaval, transforming the fate of Britain.
The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare’s great history plays – Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V – dramatise England’s epic battles for legitimacy and leadership.
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tagged in: BBC, Eddie Marsan, King & Conqueror, Reunion, Supacell, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power