The “crass caricatures” Eddie Marsan refuses to play onscreen: “I avoid them”
For someone who doesn’t want to get typecast and doesn’t want to get pigeon-holed for appearing in gangster movies and TV shows, east London actor Eddie Marsan has definitely spent plenty of his career appearing in gangster movies and TV shows.
But to be fair to him, he’s very good at what he does, and he has to count as one of British acting’s most successful working-class exports of the last couple of decades, going from the streets of Stepney in 1970s London to Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York at the start of this century.
Marsan began his work on screen with a succession of TV shows in the 1990s before making a film debut as ‘Mugger number one’ in the Bill Murray comedy The Man Who Knew Too Little in 1997. Several more big-screen roles followed, including the Malcolm McDowell movie Gangster No 1, until he got the call from Scorsese in 2002.
After that, he appeared in a string of major Hollywood movies, including V for Vendetta, Mission Impossible III, Miami Vice and Will Smith’s Hancock, before he teamed up with Guy Ritchie for the first time on the 2009 Sherlock Holmes reboot starring Robert Downey Jr.
Marsan was prolific and took on a host of projects, including another Sherlock movie, before he landed one of the lead roles on a US cable TV show, Ray Donovan. Appearing opposite Liev Schreiber and the legendary Midnight Cowboy star Jon Voight, the show was a big success and ran for seven seasons, winning a host of industry award nominations.
Throughout its time, though, Marsan continued to work on a variety of movies and shows and linked up with Ritchie again on 2019’s gritty hit The Gentlemen with Matthew McConaughey, and again on 2021’s Wrath of Man with Jason Statham. Last year, he made a small independent British film about four thieves hiding out in the middle of nowhere with their ill-gotten gains, and felt it was a throwback to some classic crime movies from the 1980s.
Marsan told Yahoo News about making All the Devils Are Here, saying, “We in this country now make gangster movies where gangsters are wishful filming characters, and we’ve lost that art of making a gangster movie that’s full of vulnerability and sadness and regret like The Long Good Friday or Mona Lisa. And I thought this was in that vein. I get asked to do gangster movies all the time, and I avoid them because I think they’re just crass caricatures.”
Both movies mentioned by Marsan starred the late Bob Hoskins, the first of which was a 1980 thriller set in some of the more rundown parts of London and featuring an early appearance from Pierce Brosnan. The Long Good Friday has since gone down as one of the best British films of all time, the story of Hoskin’s cockney crime boss trying to go straight and become a property mogul while getting the American mafia to bankroll his plans.
In the meantime, Marsan is about to unite with Ritchie for the sixth movie in his career as Sherlock Holmes 3 goes into pre-production, where he’ll be playing the incompetent Inspector Lestrade, and he’ll also be seen next year alongside Adrien Brody and Bill Skarsgård in the forthcoming historical action epic Emperor.
