The characters I’ve played that people have noticed included a cross-dresser and a transsexual.
I am not bothered with whether my characters are conventional or not. Because I am not in this for the designer labels and the autographs.
When I write, I try to become different characters.
Sometimes even when the book is over I don’t know who’s good and who’s bad. It’s really more interesting, I think, to write about gray characters than it is to write about black and white.
It’s normal that if you are working with a lot of people, then you have a lot of different mentalities and characters. You have the serious guy, and you have the one who is always complaining and the one who is always talking. Everyone is different.
Character roles only indicate that they’re very different from who you are as a person, and for me, it’s fun hiding behind characters that are so unlike who I am.
I think the type of actor I am, I tend to play strong leading female characters. The shows I’ve been on happen to be science fiction genre.
They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.
I love Los Angeles, and it’s been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who’s living them? You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.
When you see bad acting, that’s usually what it is – they’re not listening to the other characters. It’s always hard with first-time actors to get them in that moment where they are really listening to the other characters and reacting to the other characters.
I’m so into playing different characters, even when I was on Nickelodeon. I just observe.
The maxims of men reveal their characters.
Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice.
I consider myself a humanist. Even if I do very dark worlds, I try to make those characters real humans as opposed to just cartoons.
I’m interested in characters that have just a touch of madness.
When you’re writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children’s books.
There’s always something at least a little smug about self-reference – magazine articles about idealistic journalists, TV shows about TV actors, ironic films within ironic-er films: all this meta-media populated by thinly disguised characters making oblique inside jokes.
With each film, I get more and more involved and it’s more and more time-consuming. Also, I like to break myths and people’s preconceived ideas. My characters have always stood for something, have always had an opinion, although they’ve never really rebelled.
Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.
I like playing characters that fit my age and represent that time and the situations we face.
On the web, people are experimenting with something new in terms of characters and stories. It is exciting for actors, as we get a chance to do something new.
When you read a book, the neurons in your brain fire overtime, deciding what the characters are wearing, how they’re standing, and what it feels like the first time they kiss. No one shows you. The words make suggestions. Your brain paints the pictures.
Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.
Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.
I love novels where not much ‘happens’ but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters.
I also try very hard to create characters – both heroes and villains – with psychological depth.
I’ve never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life. They didn’t choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them.
The period characters I have played have all been these wonderfully forward-thinking women.
I write about characters that interest me. And I don’t think of my books as being forms of entertainment.
You know a lot of times wrestlers get too full of themselves. They can’t separate themselves from the characters. They get used to the excitement, the energy, the lifestyle and the money and with a lot of these guys, when it stops, they self-destruct.
You come before me this morning with clean hands and clean collars. I want you to have clean tongues, clean manners, clean morals and clean characters.
Today’s youth cannot miss something they have never known, but I fear that there are no current fictional characters whose impact and influence will last with such abiding affection into their ‘sore and yellow’ as this splendid man’s creations have in mine!
I love songs but am inhibited to have my characters burst out to express themselves through songs. I use the route of using old songs at the right places.
I think that’s something that people feel that I do really well; I don’t mind it, because ultimately I think the characters I play move people, and who wouldn’t want to move people?
There’s so much of, it could have been a very critical examination of what happened, and really the emotional lives of the people involved sort of carry the characters forward.
I think it is important that you care about the characters, and you are not just waiting for the next action sequence but have a vested interested in what happens to them.
Well, for me, I grew up in the Carolinas, and it’s our mythology. Those are the characters that we learn about how to live life and moral lessons. It wasn’t Zeus and Athena. It was Job and Jesus.
It’s easier to play quirky characters and hide behind wardrobe and make-up, especially.
They’re all based on factual characters. Well, a good amount of them. That’s why I was attracted to this genre anyways, because these characters are so large and cartoonish, they’re like caricatures, I just felt that there had to be a film made about them.
Great novels have great characterization no matter what. But multiple points of view let me examine characters from entirely different perspectives, allowing me to learn more about everyone in the process.
You can’t really judge characters, because that’s when it gets really hard to play them.
Otherness is a big thing for me. I’m always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn’t lead.
Because I grew up in Africa, I always see people and try to understand characters as what kind of animal they’d be.
I still have a problem with nuns. I follow them around like a kitten with a ball of yarn. After a while, all my characters become very close friends.
I like to try to make the characters I play be as human as possible.
It’s very important for feminism for us to tell our daughters that they should be strong. But to tell our sons that they can be vulnerable, to have these characters on screen that are not perfectly masculine cowboys that never fail, for our boys to change their psyche as well, that’s equally important for feminism.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
My Southern heritage is a big part of who I am. I grew up around people who seemed like characters but are actual, real people. My grandmother made sure I had manners and all that stuff.
The physical journey in my films is indicative of the internal journey that my characters take.
Through these years, I have attempted to create magical moments between my characters because, be it television or films, life is about the moments we create while living through it.
I’d say I’m drawn to characters that ring true to me. Adolescence is a troubled time for everyone, so a lot of those characters have been troubled, tortured people. It’s been a great way to navigate my adolescence by having these more troubled kids as an outlet.
This is an area you always need to address when you’re dealing with Dracula is the fact that there is something kind of attractive in his darkness – which there isn’t in other horror characters.
I feel happy to play strong women because, as an audience member, I feel such characters inspire women when they are down.
My characters do have some fantastic taste in men.
A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.
