Eddie Marsan interview: ‘Gangster films these days are just middle-class fantasies'

Telegraph

15-05-2025

On 21 December 1988, Pan American Airways flight 103, travelling from Frankfurt to Detroit via London Heathrow, was set to make the transatlantic leg of its journey when it exploded over Lockerbie in south-west Scotland. All 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 people on the ground were killed as the plane was ripped apart and fell from 30,000 ft onto the small town, causing a huge fireball. When investigators discovered that the explosion had been caused by a bomb, it confirmed the attack as the deadliest ever to hit the UK.
The horror of that winter night and its aftermath, and the desperately complicated search for those responsible, is retold in BBC One's new six-part drama The Bombing of Pan Am 103. 'The investigation keeps you on the edge of your seat,' says Eddie Marsan, who plays the real-life FBI explosives expert Tom Thurman. 'But there's a heartbreaking element to the drama, and how it explores the humanity of the situation.' He was struck by how the Lockerbie community came together to support one another and all the victims' families.
Marsan recalls that he was working in a menswear store in Bethnal Green, east London, and looking forward to starting drama school, when television news began reporting a plane crash that evening. He would go on to build a reputation as one of Britain's finest actors, in diverse roles such as the shy, reclusive Reg in Mike Leigh's Vera Drake, the anger-filled driving instructor and conspiracy theorist in the same director's Happy-Go-Lucky and as Amy Winehouse's ebullient father Mitch in the recent biopic Back to Black.
The Lockerbie bombing itself is the subject of various alternative theories, some more outlandish than others. The case remains labyrinthine and contentious, with many of its key details disputed. The trail led to the conviction in 2001 of Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on 270 counts of murder (and the upcoming US trial of fellow Libyan operative Abu Agila Mohammad Mas'ud, accused of making the bomb).
Arrest warrants were issued for al-Megrahi and another defendant (later acquitted) after a three-year joint investigation by the FBI and Scottish police concluded that Libya was wholly responsible. Yet as far back as 1991, the CIA's former head of counterterrorist operations, who had overseen the Pan Am investigation for the agency, was telling The New York Times that 'it was 'outrageous' to dismiss the responsibility that falls on Syria, and possibly Iran, and pin it solely on Libya'.
The involvement of Libya has, of course, been tested in court, and the government of now-deposed leader Muammar Gaddafi accepted responsibility in 2003. Yet there are still those who view the bombing as a revenge attack by Iran, carried out by a Palestinian terror group, for the shooting down of an Iranian passenger airliner, in July 1987, with missiles fired from a US aircraft carrier, which killed all 290 people on board.
Among those who do not believe the official explanation are Jim Swire, the British GP whose 24-year-old daughter Flora was killed on Pan Am 103. Swire was played by Colin Firth in Sky Atlantic's Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, which aired in January this year. In it, Swire is shown grappling with a cover-up.
'I watched it. I was very defensive of the Scottish police and the FBI and the CIA,' says Marsan. 'I felt very protective towards them, [to] the kind of accusations in that, because I got to know those people. I got to know the FBI guys, and I got to hear the stories about the Scottish police and how they coped. I know what they'd gone through.'
Marsan is an actor who studies the real-life historical figures that he plays, which range from the second American president John Adams in Apple TV+'s Franklin to John Darwin, the prison officer who faked his own death in ITV's The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe. For The Bombing of Pan Am 103, he read up on the case and met Thurman himself. 'He was a fascinating man, a fascinating study,' Marsan says, noting the investigator's strong Kentucky accent. 'He was obsessed – and dedicated to what he was doing.'
Thurman is a controversial figure in the investigation, having been censured in a 1997 report by the US Justice Department's Inspector General into failings by the FBI's forensic-crime laboratory, which led to him being transferred. He plays an important role in The Bombing of Pan Am 103, not least in relation to a fragment of a timing device that was crucial to the original case. Some have gone so far as to suggest it may have been planted. Is Marsan certain that couldn't be the case? 'Well, I'm not an expert. I know that Tom's 100 per cent certain, and I believe Tom.
'What the series does is follow the investigation… it's a very complex web. I think what conspiracy theorists like to do is to find a simple solution. And I don't think there is a simple solution to what happened, but I think they got the right person in al-Megrahi.'
Marsan is certainly a straight-talker: 'the thing about me, I'm a bit Buddhist and a bit Bethnal Green' is how he puts it. The Buddhist part grew out of controlling his anxiety through meditation. The Bethnal Green part came from growing up there, with his lorry driver dad and teaching-assistant mum, and leaving school at 16 with no qualifications. He lives in leafy Chiswick now but was back in his old manor recently to celebrate the OBE he received from Princess Anne at Windsor Castle in April with family and friends. The East End wasn't gentrified back when he was a kid in the 1970s and '80s, he notes. He's 56 now.
He tells me that he is no fan of the slick big-budget London gangster fare that has exerted a grip on TV schedules recently – 'they're basically middle-class fantasies of what it means to be an East End gangster, and they don't acknowledge the trauma those people inflicted on those communities. I know what the Kray twins did to my community. I know people who were hurt by them.'
He's pithy, with a telling turn of phrase. He finds the idea of actors needing 'lived experience' ridiculous, for instance. 'It's not an anthropological exercise. You don't go and find someone and think, 'Oh, he's the real specimen.' We're not Neanderthals. We're artists.'
His career has criss-crossed the Atlantic, from Scorsese's Gangs of New York to the south London-set (and Bafta-nominated) Supacell. President Trump's idea of banning films produced outside the US baffles him – 'It's a very childlike way of thinking of how you make films, to be honest. It's like the bloke in the corner of the pub who's deciding how to run the world but never leaves that pub.'
He's a believer that stories can be both parochial and universal at the same time, noting of Mr Jones vs The Post Office, 'I'm sure somebody in Vietnam could sit and watch that thinking, 'this is how bureaucracy can ruin lives'.'
Marsan has ambitions to produce and direct himself, he adds, and much admired his pal Stephen Graham 's efforts in creating Adolescence, the drama about a young teenager who stabs a fellow pupil. Marsan is the father of four teenagers – one daughter and three sons – and says his family talked deeply about the drama over Sunday lunch. He thinks comments such as ElonMusk's dismissal of the series as 'anti-white propaganda', because the child was not black, represent 'the last kicking and screaming of white supremacy in the world'. And he asks the question: 'if it was a black kid who had done that, would we be so ready to think that he was influenced by society?'
Writer Jack Thorne has said that it wasn't about race, but about boys and masculinity. Marsan suggests boys lack a 'heroic context', in contrast to girls, 'because the injustices that were blocking their way for hundreds of years have been highlighted. It can make you go, 'Right, I'm going to take that on'. What I worry about young men is that they can't find their heroic context. And the people who are stepping in, like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson or Russell Brand, all these people are trying to give them a belligerent heroic context.'
He has little time for Brand's embrace of Buddhism, Christianity and transcendental meditation. 'I've meditated for 25 years, I go in a room and I shut the door, and I sit there and quietly meditate. It's a very private thing. And he meditates in front of three million people. It's not meditating. It's showing off.'
His own interest in it grew out of the breathing exercises he learned at drama school. He still gets nervous on day one of a shoot, although he says, that 'the more experience you get as an actor, the more the quality of letting go comes into play'. It's what he relied on when he agreed to take on the play The Oak Tree at the Young Vic this May, in which the actor has no knowledge of the script before he arrives on the night. 'I just turn up,' he says. 'I can't get it wrong, because I can't get it right.'
On his first day on The Bombing of Pan Am 103 he was confronted by lots of actors he knew, including Peter Mullan, who plays a Scottish police chief, all speaking in their native accents. 'I've known Peter for nearly 20 years, and he's speaking to me in his Glaswegian accent,' he tells me, 'and I say, 'I'm going to speak to you in a Kentucky accent.' He goes, 'Alright, knock yourself out'.' Marsan pulls it off, of course; his Thurman is a dogged, hands-on puzzle-solver.
As for the upcoming trial nearly 40 years on from the original attack, Marsan says, 'If a member of my family had died in a plane in Lockerbie or anywhere in the world, I think justice is essential. I would demand it. I don't think the delay comes into it.'