There’s an honourable tradition of British actors who’ve gone to Hollywood playing baddies. Part of that is because we grow up with Richard III and Macbeth – we’re not afraid of our villains.
I think many villains have the burden of not being very human.
Namor has shades of grey but always ends up doing the right thing. I’ve played characters with an edge – played villains if not super villains – and he’s an anti-hero.
Both villains and heroes need to have a steadfast belief in themselves.
That’s the thing about writing for a lot of the villains is that, as a writer, you kind of have to put the best part of your own personality aside and instead focus on whatever little strange quirks you may have in your personality.
Batman is pretty much a self-trained guy. I think it would be fun to do a character like Superman or Captain Marvel or maybe Green Lantern, somebody who’s got a completely different resource for fighting crime and fighting villains.
I always felt that heroes were essentially dull. Villains were more exotic and could do more interesting things.
I look at some of the old villains in the Disney movies. If you really listen, you can hear some of the villains or some of the supporting characters, they use the voices over and over because they were so versatile in the way that they performed on voiceovers.
I’ve played a lot of villains. The villains are always fun because you can just go fractionally bigger than life. It’s always a grey area because you don’t want to end up mustache-twirling and making them a little false, but you always get to play a little more, whereas the lead guy has to be a little more straight.
Part of what’s interesting about the ‘Star Wars’ world is, villains are complex, obviously, and they occupy, as in life, different roles within different organizations.
Wonder Woman is not horrible. Her villains should be.
With any good story, you need the adversary, the heroes and villains. You need a good mixture to make it work.
History will tell where I stand in the ranks of Bond villains, I have no control over that.
We should tell the honest, painful stories of 9/11 because it dishonors the memory of heroes to invent a phony cast of villains when the actual terrorists were terrible enough to tear open this nation’s heart.
Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world’s ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.
If you stop to think, the only films that don’t include at least one punch in -the jaw are musical comedies. And even then some of those villains get brained in the middle of an aria.
We, at one point, had such great villains with shades of grey and a compelling story around them. But Bollywood did see a decline when villains were nothing but aimless goons who had no real purpose to them.
Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.
I think this is a trait that runs throughout the queer community, the obsession with the hyper-feminine female villains. And we see it in Disney movies and in movies like ‘Death Becomes Her,’ and in characters like Poison Ivy and Catwoman.
The idea that all Israelis are villains is a childish idea. Israel is the most deeply divided, argumentative society. You’ll never find two Israelis that agree with one another – it’s hard to find even one who agrees with himself or herself.
I have got a big deep voice, and that comes in useful for villains.
I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.
Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It’s about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.
It’s fun playing villains. It’s people who are not held by any moral constraints – or any constraints, for that matter. It’s a chance to be completely off the leash and do things that you never could in real life.
I love playing bad. But my whole thing is usually villains that don’t know that they’re evil.
I love writing villains because I was the big sister of five girls, so I had heavy responsibility growing up. I had to be ‘the good girl.’
It was important to me that my heroes not be all good and my villains not be all bad.
The other thing is we have an incredible villain. And we worked very hard to have villains that are connected to the hero. They have an effect, an emotional effect. They never become out-of-this-world, crazy villains.
For Trump, the story is everything. There is no real plan to defeat the villains that Trump tees up, of course.
This I realized very late, that villain remains villain and are never able to become artists. We are never counted as actors and always addressed as villains.
You go back to look over the body of my work, and there are no archetypal villains in my books.
I’m always interested in getting to know people, and that means vilified people as much as those celebrated. You find out that heroes aren’t always so heroic, and villains have some bit of humanity in them.
For mine, the villains of the piece were always important. In a traditional sense, that’s always an important role.
Villains are a lot of fun. My villains have a lot of tongue-in-cheek. They are sometimes conscious of and a little bit gleeful of their villainy.
Look, I don’t think villains are interesting when you can’t tell where they’re coming from.
The villains will come along. There were plenty in the Carter administration, and there will be plenty with Reagan.
I don’t choose my villains and heroes for political reasons.
I think it would be a problem if Hollywood was casting British actors only as villains; if that were the case, then certainly there would be cause for concern.
We want our villains and antagonists to have distinct motivations.
Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.
I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic.
My favorite actor who played villains – who could play anything, really – was Jimmy Cagney.
The specific influences on villains to me is, I love the villains who are really hyper-smart. When at the end of the movie you find out what they were about, and it makes absolutely perfect sense from their point of view.
Everyone says villains are thankless parts, but those are really the best roles.
Evil is relative – and what I mean by that is that our villains are as complex, as deep and as compelling as any of our heroes. Every antagonist in the DC Universe has a unique darkness, desire and drive. And the reason for being of ‘Forever Evil’ is to explore that darkness.
I love playing villains.
Actors endow the villain in fiction with a warmth and quality that makes them memorable. I think we like fictional villains because they’re the Mr. Hyde of our own dreams. I’ve met a few real villains in my time, and they weren’t the least bit sympathetic.
Villains are as important as the hero. Without the right villain, the hero isn’t heroic enough.
And I think that when I play these villains, maybe what is different is that the audience sees me play these and they know that that’s Chris and he’s having fun and he knows that and he knows that and you know that and everybody knows that.
I love villains.
When I wrote my eighth thriller, ‘Inside Out,’ in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.
People are much more complicated in real life, but my characters are as subtle and nuanced as I can make them. But if you say my characters are too black and white, you’ve missed the point. Villains are meant to be black-hearted in popular novels. If you say I have a grey-hearted villain, then I’ve failed.
One thing that’s happened to me is I’ve been around a long time and I’ve played a lot of villains and so forth. I think it had to do with, well one thing is that I looked younger than I was for a long time. Now I think I’m suddenly starting to play people’s father.
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