“I don’t know whether you can, institutionally,” he says. “You have to confront it.” Then he adds, “Playing John Darwin was interesting because he was someone who lies. And doing that makes you realise that when people lie, they’re thinking you’re not as smart as they are. They think of themselves in 3D and everybody else in 2D.” He brings up Partygate. “I was in post-production forwhile Boris Johnson was standing in front of parliament.
Marsan’s physical appearance – small-ish, barrel-like, with Mr Tumnus ears – has played a significant role in his career. When I ask why he is so often required to play terrible characters, he says, “Someone explained it to me. In Greek theatre, someone who is aesthetically exact was seen as a manifestation of morality and someone like me, who isn’t handsome, who is kind of weird looking, is a manifestation of immorality.
“The people I grew up with, people on the estate, all of us had chaos in our lives,” he says. “A lot of us had fathers with orders not to come anywhere near the house. There was a breakdown of family… But all of us, because of the chaos, we had aspiration. It created a volition in us.” From a place of safety, Marsan began to “question the orthodoxy of the white working class,” he says.
Looking back, Marsan believes he had “a bit of a breakdown” after his parents’ divorce. “I had a lot of questions,” he says. One day, he was asked to play an extra in a film shooting in the East End. “I sawdo a scene, and I thought: I can do that, that’s what I want to do, I want to become an actor.” At the time, Marsan was working in a menswear shop owned by a local man he still refers to, formally, as Mr Bennett.