Source: www.newsweek.com - Sunday, February 01, 2015
“Funerals are for the living. If there’s no one there, there’s no one to care.” So says the unsympathetic boss in the Eddie Marsan film Still Life , about a funeral officer in London. It’s not the sort of job your high school counselor told you about. Marsan, as the enigmatic and largely silent John May, stages last rites for people whom time (and their families) has forgotten: derelicts and lonely old ladies who seem to have no next of kin and little left in the way of worldly goods to tell us what kind of lives they lived. “I met three or four of these different funeral officers” in preparing for the role, says Marsan from his home in London. “When someone died they would try and find out something about the people. And it was very sad and poignant. They informed me a lot in making the film.” May brings his work home with him—keeping a scrapbook full of the photos of the deceased, writing eulogies based on what he’s learned, even picking out the music (American gospel, Greek Orthodox) he imagines the departed would have liked. “He doesn’t express his thoughts, but he’s still thinking,” says Marsan of his character, and perhaps his method. The successful character actor is probably best known to American audiences for his role as Liev Schreiber’s brother Terry in Showtime’s Ray Donovan, or as the world’s worst driving instructor in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky . “You don’t have to show a character; you just have to be a character
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“Funerals are for the living. If there’s no one there, there’s no one to care.” So says the unsympathetic boss in the Eddie Marsan film Still Life , about a funeral officer in London. It’s not the sort of job your high school counselor told you about. Marsan, as the enigmatic and largely silent John May, stages last rites for people whom time (and their families) has forgotten: derelicts and lonely old ladies who seem to have no next of kin and little left in the way of worldly goods to tell us what kind of lives they lived. “I met three or four of these different funeral officers” in preparing for the role, says Marsan from his home in London. “When someone died they would try and find out something about the people. And it was very sad and poignant. They informed me a lot in making the film.” May brings his work home with him—keeping a scrapbook full of the photos of the deceased, writing eulogies based on what he’s learned, even picking out the music (American gospel, Greek Orthodox) he imagines the departed would have liked. “He doesn’t express his thoughts, but he’s still thinking,” says Marsan of his character, and perhaps his method. The successful character actor is probably best known to American audiences for his role as Liev Schreiber’s brother Terry in Showtime’s Ray Donovan, or as the world’s worst driving instructor in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky . “You don’t have to show a character; you just have to be a character
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