Time & Perspective Quote by Marton Csokas

There is a particular kind of honesty actors reserve for stunt work: not the glamour of danger, but the grind of repetition. Marton Csokas frames his point with a casual flex ("relatively physically adept") and a boyish appetite for impact ("throwing myself around"), then undercuts it with the math of the job. Once or twice is play. Nine, ten, eleven is labor. The line is built like a stunt itself: a confident run-up followed by a hard landing.

The intent is clear: demystify the macho mythology around action performance. Csokas isn’t claiming hero status; he’s marking the boundary between capability and cost. That counting cadence matters. It conjures the reality of film sets where "realistic" doesn’t mean true, it means repeatable: the same fall, the same hit, the same sell, from multiple angles, under lights, while your body quietly accumulates evidence.

Subtextually, he’s also talking about the weird bargain of acting in physical roles. You’re asked to make pain legible without letting it become actual injury, to perform spontaneity on schedule. "Not very pleasant" is almost comically understated, a British-style shrug that signals soreness, risk, and the kind of fatigue that doesn’t read on camera.

Contextually, this fits the era of increasingly kinetic mainstream cinema and TV, where mid-budget productions still demand big physicality, even when CGI exists. The quote punctures the fantasy: the bravest part isn’t the fall. It’s doing the fall again, and still making the audience believe it was the first time.