"There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination"
About this Quote
The subtext is a defense of process over persona. Marsan isn’t the kind of celebrity actor whose brand is effortless magnetism; his career has been built on specificity, transformation, and the less glamorous end of the character-actor spectrum. So “simple” here doesn’t mean easy. It means legible: show up, interrogate the text, interrogate the person, interrogate yourself. Acting becomes a kind of applied curiosity.
“Asking questions” hints at the real engine of performance: not emoting on command, but investigating motive, status, fear, contradiction. That’s why the line lands in a cultural moment where actors are expected to be content machines and pundits, not craftsmen. Marsan is arguing for a quieter ideal: the imagination as labor, not escapism. You don’t wait for inspiration; you build it, one question at a time.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Marsan, Eddie. (2026, January 15). There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/theres-no-great-mystery-to-acting-its-a-very-145231/
Chicago Style
Marsan, Eddie. "There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/theres-no-great-mystery-to-acting-its-a-very-145231/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/theres-no-great-mystery-to-acting-its-a-very-145231/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.


