The fact is, Marsden, who‘s 46, essentially winged his way into a career on an accommodating breeze. He spent “a few semesters” at Oklahoma State, not far from where he grew up, before deciding to drive West in his Honda Accord to pursue his showbiz dream, which was then only a few years old. “I discovered being onstage, and my abilities as an actor, when I was 14 or 15 years old,” he told me. “The first time an audience applauded or laughed at a joke, it was the first time I felt like I could be good at something.”
He had the raw talent, and the looks, for sure. But he also had a high degree of good fortune—an almost annoying amount. Marsden’s father agreed to support him financially for his first year in Los Angeles, and set him up with a friend of his, whom Marsden said was “a very successful casting director.” That casting director in turn connected Marsden with a manager, and it was off to the races. Marsden realizes what an abundance of easily won riches this was.
“I had parents that supported me, I had a guy who was sending me out on auditions. I wasn’t pounding the pavement knocking on agents’ doors. I had representation right when I moved out,” he said. “I was very, very grateful and lucky. And then I was like, okay, now it’s up to you. Now you gotta do these auditions and make people remember you and show people why you should be cast in this.” In essence, he felt he had to retroactively earn the blessings bestowed upon him (genetically and otherwise), wanting to prove himself again and again in whatever audition was put before him.
“I felt like I was shot out of a cannon,” he said of that time. “I was lit up with excitement about being able to pursue the thing that I felt like I was good at. Maybe this sounds arrogant, but I feel like that was evident to a lot of the casting directors. ‘Who is this kid from Oklahoma who’s so excited to be here, and saying yes ma’am and no m’am?’ There’s something about watching someone do what they love to do. I would imagine that’s something that helped me early on.”
Pretty soon, the soap opera Days of Our Lives came sniffing around, and Marsden wanted to jump at the chance. “In my mind at the time, I was like, this is great! I’ll be paid to be an actor on a show my girlfriend used to watch every day? It’s the most secure job you can have as an actor. That means continued work for three years. My manager said, ‘Wait a second.’”
In fact, his manager was getting such good feedback from Marsden’s various auditions that he figured they could hold out to “catch bigger fish.” That more discerning tack eventually led Marsden to X-Men, in 2000, which helped secure his footing in the industry. But success didn’t dull Marsden’s drive or curiosity. “X-Men was the first time that made me feel like, all right, this is potentially going to put me on a global map,” he said. “People are going to know who I am. But I never wanted to rely on having a career because people knew who I was, or that I was playing an iconic superhero character. I wanted to be remembered and have durability because of my work, I guess. Not necessarily because of what I was associated with.”
Marsden’s unbridled eagerness to perform gradually evolved into a true design for living: “I wanted to target the good work; the good filmmakers, the good directors, the good scripts. But they could be any genre. And whoever cast me, that’s what I’m doing next. It wasn’t until about 10 years later that I looked back and started thinking, This is really cool. It looks like a decision that I made early on to purposefully go after different things every time. I looked back and I saw this colorful path of all these different characters and I thought, I’m going to adopt that as a career philosophy.”