When two characters or two actresses are together for a while there is bound to be chemistry developing.
I like to hide behind the characters I play. Despite the public perception, I am a very private person who has a hard time with the fame thing.
It’s the emotional trigger points that are important to me because I know if I could believe in the characters and try and imagine how they felt then I’d be able to do something quite honest.
I tend to be attracted to characters who are up against a wall with very few alternatives. And the film then becomes an examination of how they cope with very few options. And that’s, I guess, what interests me in terms of human behavior.
The fact I have alopecia is a unique thing. It lends itself to these very bright, vibrant characters, whether a good guy or a bad guy.
It’s certainly more interesting for me as an actor, but I think it’s also more interesting for the audience to see three-dimensional characters, rather than just a bad guy or a good guy.
Doing voiceovers is so great because even though many people would think it’s just your voice, you really do use all your physicality. I’ve done everything from playing a butterfly to Alice in Wonderland when she’s 10 feet tall, so it allows you to be an actor and build new characters.
It was a big deal to me to play characters and feel things and connect to somebody in a fake world.
Everyone in those days expected that art students were wild, licentious characters. We didn’t know how to be, but we sure were anxious to learn.
There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That’s where the real art lies. See, I always suspect characters who are painted as lovely, decent human beings. I would always question where the darkness lies.
I have few other characters to relate to other than myself. I have enough of a body of work now that the paternal side of Alan Thicke gets a lot of play. I do get a lot of calls to play dads.
When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
I never want to sort of put all the cards on the table all at once, because that’s somehow there’s always a journey to go on. There’s always something to be revealed, in my mind, about characters.
One of the trickiest things about ‘Game of Thrones’ is just seeding those first couple of episodes with that basic information that people need to know, both about the world and the ground rules of the world, and the relationships between the characters, as far as who means what to whom and why.
I don’t write about love because it makes for easy, passive heroes. I write about how love makes my characters more autonomous, more self-possessed, more opinionated and powerful. I write about characters who pursue relationships that make them the people they want to become. I write about love as a superpower.
With all of the qualities of the scene-setting, the dialogue, the place and time and the time and place in which your characters move. And I want to move with the characters, move with them and describe the world in which they are living.
I think younger readers connect so readily to animal characters because they share a certain vulnerability, particularly when it comes to adult humans, who can be a rather unpredictable lot.
For the most part, my characters don’t talk to me. I like to lord over them like some kind of benevolent deity. And, for the most part, my characters go along with it. I write intense character sketches and long, play-like conversations between me and them, but they stay out of the book writing itself.
I like characters with problems. I like to understand them… To play alcoholics, fetishists, strange girls, you have to dig deep within yourself. It’s ‘elsewhere’ that interests me.
All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.
There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.
When I look at acting careers that I really admire, I see that it’s been a precise decision-making process for these people. They make decisions based on what they love, and they do only the things that they are passionate about. They play only characters that they can’t stop thinking about.
Well, for one, I don’t judge my characters.
Don’t think for a moment that I’m really like any of the characters I’ve played. I’m not. That’s why it’s called ‘acting’.
I think all those actors from that generation, like Bogart – they were wonderful actors. They didn’t act. They just came on and they did it, and the characters were wonderful.
The human mind has infinite capacity to rationalize, and evil characters just push that boundary a bit. Whatever they’re doing, they think it makes sense to do it, and they think they have a good reason to do it. In short, they feel justified.
The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you’re at the center of the universe – if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.
I love to have real people of history interact with my fictional characters. History gives me the plot. I research the period meticulously, and then I blend in a romantic and sensual love story to give it balance. The heavier the history, the more romantic the couple must be.
As for dream roles, they usually just speak to you. I just crave complex characters.
For me and my films, I want my audience to experience cinema in its full glory. It’s not just visual, it’s audio as well. It’s emotional, and I want you to be engaged with not just the scene but with the characters.
I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.
I’m much more comfortable speaking through my characters’ voices than my own.
The thing is, I want to play real characters and not all girls can be pretty. The thing is, you get these girls who say ‘I’m a character actor’ then you see them in a role and nothing has really changed but the outfit.
I grew up watching ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and used to dream that I would grow up to be just like her. In a way, ‘Teen Wolf’ has a lot of those kinds of characters. We’re just kids by day, and yet we’re trying to fight demons and werewolves and bad people and save people that we love.
People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: They acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced His will in all things.
Playing different characters in different films helps keep you excited about what you do. It always seems like a whole new adventure.
At the end of the day, stand-up comedy is like acting when the audience are the other characters that I’m acting with.
I actually then went on to direct an after-school special where one of the characters was deaf. They hired me without even knowing I had any connection to the community.
I personally do not believe ‘Premam’ has influenced anyone in any way; it has just portrayed characters and is one man’s story where he falls in love with his teacher, and I don’t believe people would use this as a reason to imitate it.
I would say that a lot of the characters I’ve been attracted to are very vulnerable and they expose themselves emotionally. Not so much in ‘The Fighter,’ not so much in ‘The Master’ – I think those are different.
I’m sure some of the characters in ‘X-Men’ had a lot of physically demanding stuff to do, but my character’s pretty much stand-and-deliver, stand there and throw fire at people. There’s no acrobatics or anything.
The characters can’t be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty.
Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do.
The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept – and I’m sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series led to similar tears.
Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears.
Many of us grew up with colourful characters such as Tony the Tiger, Coco the Monkey and Ronald McDonald. These figures were designed to market products – from sugary breakfast cereals to hamburgers – to children.
I want to keep doing different things. I’d like to do a more personal, dramatic movie next, I think. But as long as it’s about characters and good writing and good parts for actors, that’s what’s important.
I guarantee you that two directors that are any good can take the same story, change the name of the characters, change the name of the town, and make an entirely different picture.
My films are personal-voice-driven films about human characters and the place we live. Technically, I’m an independent filmmaker.
I realized that I wanted to play characters and do traditional theatre. I wanted to make believe again. I like putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else for a few hours, and I have a great respect for playwrights.
