You can’t go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.
So as long as I’m a working actor, I can improve. I want to work with people that frighten me and excite me, and characters that I don’t believe I’m the best person for the part but I’m still gonna try anyway. Those are my favorite roles.
I try to build a full personality for each of our cartoon characters – to make them personalities.
Dan Brown is a character from ‘Foucault’s Pendulum!’ I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations – the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
Representation means having characters with layers, showing them as human beings, so we can relate or have mixed emotions for that character.
I can play characters who sing, but I don’t like singing in a nightclub or something. It’s not my metier.
We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.
Matt Weiner is very perceptive; there’s something about the rhythms and the way people speak that is very authentic to the actor. But there are qualities that are dissimilar. The characters on ‘Mad Men’ are struggling with pretty profound unhappiness, but I can tell you this is a happy bunch.
I just have my own taste, and I just try and stick with that. I’m just trying to play as many characters as I can for as long as I have an opportunity to.
I must have been 10 or 11, but anything Dana Carvey ever did, I just really loved. He was on for a long time, I don’t really know when that era was. I could watch Dana Carvey with my parents, they loved him too. They loved all his characters.
On ‘Avatar’, I learned that it’s worth taking some risks and doing some weird little things with characters or having an off-joke here and there, even if it’s only for 5 percent of the audience.
The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That’s another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up.
In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that’s fun.
The ‘Fargo’ characters, they’re the characters of my people. They’re stoic, hardworking, uncomplaining, and I loved them.
I think why people relate to ‘Star Wars’ is George Lucas is so brilliant at telling these stories that we relate to, but in such a fantastic environment with fantastic characters and things you want to believe in this story.
I have great mood swings, maybe because of playing lots of different characters as I do. I’m like a gymnast whose muscles get too stretched. I’ve got better at it, but I have a lot of emotional energy.
People lament that there’s no roles being written for South Asian or Muslim characters. But their parents don’t want their children to go into the entertainment field. You don’t get it both ways.
A lot of people go in and have to create their own characters, and they do fine with it.
Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.
I always say I write my own novels and the characters don’t take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, ‘What is he or she like,’ and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.
I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that’s why, over the years, in my movies I’ve had characters who didn’t care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.
All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.
What’s so cool about movies is once you’re done with the movie, you put it away and come up with a whole new different idea with different characters and a different world. But in TV, you build these characters, and you build this world, and then you’re there for however long you do the show.
Obviously, a lot of TV shows are based on chronological episode viewing, and the stories are contingent upon watching it in order. Syndicated shows, you don’t have to watch in order. You’re just watching characters that don’t change that much.
I start out giving characters archetypes and parameters. Once I know the basics and have a rudimentary model, it’s easier to carve unique curves and edges. It’s quite easy to guess how a character is going to react if you know their background, and at a certain point, you realize you understand them personally.
An actor’s off-screen persona should never overshadow his on-screen characters.
When one of my characters becomes aware of a magical element, it might be because the world is wider than we assume it to be, but it might also be a reminder to pay attention to what is here already, hidden only because it’s been forgotten.
Texas is just so rich with characters. Women who live alone in a little house on a thousand acres with nothing but cattle and a pickup truck. And an airplane.
I think it’s definitely beneficial for these characters to have good acting voices behind them and it affects the characters in a way that people can feel like they’re part of the game and that they know these characters.
You get all of your neuroses worked out on stage. I haven’t actually played very many nice characters, certainly not on stage. It’s not a quality that attracts me.
There’s a wealth of literature out there which, hopefully, will be, you know, exploded in the future, and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling, and sort of legendary characters.
I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.
Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.
I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‘Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.’ I don’t want to be part of that.
Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.
The way I write is that I’ll actually have a conversation out loud with myself. In a weird way, I just kind of get schizophrenic and play two characters.
I think I’ve spent so much time playing characters that are so far away from me and learning how to technically build and how to technically put something on top of you.
One of the most interesting female characters I’ve written about was Meg Riddoch, the lead character in ‘The Thompson Gunner’.
If it’s a very emotional scene, you’re kind of relieved when you’ve done it, kind of spent. And there are times when you can be rattled, certain characters if they’re hyper, that can carry over, the residue of that. But I try to leave it on the set.
I’m a bore. I save all my energy for my characters.
I’m always determined that as a novelist I’m going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.
I would love to do a talk show. Naturally, I would love to do more films. I’d love to be able to see casting directors more willing to put in a character who happens to be deaf. I’m not talking about doing deaf storylines, but putting in deaf characters. I’d love to be able to do Broadway.
The ‘Doom’ thing is to be able to come at things with a different point of view. I decided the mask would just add to the mystique of the character as well as make Doom stand out. I though it’d be an easy way for people to see and differentiate between characters, sorta like when an actor gains weight for a role.
I like all my characters in one way or another, or at least I understand them.
I usually have a sense of where my characters are personally and ways in which they might transform throughout the novel. But I never know at the outset how the book will end, nor do I ever stick to my original plan.
I’ve noticed a lot of people are very bold and blustery on Twitter because it’s easy to do that with the poison keyboard and a hundred and forty characters.
Playing big, heroic characters with heart is always a lot of fun. I enjoy making movies like that, and a lot of people love to live vicariously through those characters.
I always think that I love doing what I’m doing at the moment. The past is over. I can’t go play one of those characters again. But I can play this and I can continue to grow in what I’m doing at the moment and that’s really what I’m thinking about now.
Algebra looked like Chinese characters to me, and I could never get into reading Shakespeare. I just did not get it.
I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.
Faulkner’s characters, too, were uneducated. They were deprived, but they were allowed to have very rich inner lives. I want to advocate for that, for inner lives that are much more complicated and more poetic than we think.
