One of Britain’s most versatile and acclaimed character actors has said new performers now need to be backed by the “bank of mummy and daddy” to reach the big time.
Eddie Marsan, star of major blockbusters such as the Sherlock Holmes films and Mission: Impossible III, as well as TV series Ray Donovan, and Supacell, said one thing he’s come to notice a lot over the years is how few of his castmates tend to share his working-class roots.
“If you want to be an actor in this country, and you come from a disadvantaged background, you have to be exceptional to have a hope of a career,” he says. “If you come from a privileged background, you can be mediocre.”
Speaking after being named one of the new vice presidents of drama school Mountview, and meeting students at the establishment where he too first trained, Marsan is keen to stress why it’s so necessary to support young actors who can’t fund their careers.
Eddie Marsan at Mountview. Pic: Steve Gregson
“I came here when I was in my 20s… I was a bit lost, to be honest… I was serving an apprenticeship as a printer when Mountview offered me a place,” he says.
“There were no kinds of grants then, so for the first year an East End bookmaker paid my fees, then my mum and him got together and paid the second year, then Mountview gave me a scholarship for the third year, so I owe them everything.
“I didn’t earn a living as an actor for like six, seven years… years ago, actors could sign on and basically go on the dole while doing plays… now, in order to become an actor, you have to have the bank of mummy and daddy to bankroll you for those seven or eight years when you’re not going to earn a living.”
Marsan, Dame Elaine Paige and Hamilton actor Giles Terera are all taking on ambassadorial roles to mark Mountview’s 80th anniversary, joining Dame Judi Dench, who has been president of the school since 2006.
“The parties are fantastic,” he jokes. “The two dames, they get so half-cut, honestly, you have to get an Uber to get them home!”
But he’s rather more serious about TV and film’s “fashion for posh boys”.
‘If you come from a privileged background you can be mediocre’ in the TV and film industry, says Marsan. Pic: Steve Gregson
“When I went to America and I did 21 Grams and Vera Drake. I remember thinking, ‘great I’m going to have a career now,’ but I wasn’t the idea of what Britain was selling of itself.
“Coming back from Hollywood, a publicist said to me ‘when we get to London and do publicity for the film 21 Grams we’re going to come to you’… but no one was interested… I remember coming to Waterloo station and looking up and seeing all these posh actors selling Burberry coats and posters, and they hadn’t done anything compared to what I’d done, and yet they were the image that we were pushing as a country.”
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A 2024 Creative Industries, Policy, and Evidence Centre report found 8% of British actors come from working class backgrounds, compared to 20% in the 70s and 80s.
“Even a gangster movie now, 40 years ago you would have something like The Long Good Friday or Get Carter with people like Michael Caine or Bob Hoskins who were real working-class actors playing those parts, now you have posh boys playing working-class characters.”
Within the last five or six years, he says there has at least been “more of an effort to include people of colour”.
Pic: Steve Gregson
‘They’re scared of a level-playing field’
“What I find really interesting is, I’ve been an actor for 34 years, and I remember for the first 20 years going on a set and very rarely within the crew and within the cast would you see a black face, very rarely.
“One of the saving graces really are things now like Top Boy and Supacell, where you have members of the black community making dramas about their communities, that can’t be co-opted by the middle classes.”
“People like Laurence Fox complaining that it’s unfair, I never heard them complain when you never saw a black face, never once did they say anything. Now that people are trying to address it, they think it’s unfair…because they’re scared of a level playing field.”
Now, more than ever, Marsan says he feels compelled to point out what needs to change within the industry he works in.
“Look, social media is destroying cultural discourse. It’s making people become very binary… acting and drama is an exercise in empathy and if there’s one thing that we need more of at the moment it’s that.”
