Working with animals forces an actor to work harder because you have to be quick when it comes to improvisation, and you can't break character - at all.
I've been on the show for six years and I don't even know what her history is. I sort of make things up in my mind, but I think it's hard for an audience to follow and invest in a character when they don't have the details.
It's difficult to just let go of a character. Especially after you've been preparing and researching for weeks.
I do this a lot with names. I'll start with a name, and then for some reason he won't talk much, or he's older than I pictured him just because of a name I give him. So then I finally get the right name, and I can't shut the guy up. This always happens. There's always a character who gives me trouble that way.
Every character I do is based on someone I know.
In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.
It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.
Character is supreme in life, hence Jesus stood supreme in the supreme thing - so supreme that, when we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code but a character.
The most interesting character to me is someone who is stuck in the no man's land between Belief and Unbelief, Faith and Faithlessness. I'm capitalizing like a German, but it doesn't matter whether it's faith in a person or in God, or belief in science or whatever, it's the desperate in-between state that makes for interesting dramatic tension.
In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story - especially if you've only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description.
In my first film, Five Corners, I played a very scary, violent crazed character, and it exposed me to a lot of directors.
The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment.
I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.
In most horror films, you don't really get to understand why this character is the way he is.
My job is to work hard and be honest with my character, and that's in my control. I can only try to give my best performance.
The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.
Then I got the offer to play Buck Rogers, but I turned it down thinking it was a cartoon character. Well I was wrong, it wasn't at all. So I read the script and decided I liked the character, it had a good concept.
In Men in Black, it was a very small character, no pun intended.
In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought.
Whether you're president or speaker, if you're wrong, we need to stand up and point it out. That's what Martin Luther King had talked about: being judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. So some of us pounded away on some of the ridiculous policies of Pelosi - and lo and behold, over time, the public began to see.
Our ability to handle life's challenges is a measure of our strength of character.
A character is a completely fashioned will.
Scenes change all the time. Scenes will change while you're shooting them, and you just have to roll with it 'cause that's what makes it funny. It's not being stuck in your character and how you're gonna do something, but to react to other people and to really have a real-life conversation.
I regard it in fact as the great advantage of the mathematical technique that it allows us to describe, by means of algebraic equations, the general character of a pattern even where we are ignorant of the numerical values which will determine its particular manifestation.
I love acting... I really do. I love crawling into another character's skin. That's something that I've always, always, always, always wanted.
In terms of the frustration of my character, I suppose any teenager has probably gone through that, in terms of telling their parents, I want to do one thing, and their parent says no. I think parents sometimes forget that they were children.
That godfather of the modern action blockbuster, 'The Godfather,' is entirely character driven, propelled by the transformation of a crime lord's youngest son, who breaks bad when he evolves from white-sheep war hero to blood-soaked inheritor of his father's empire.
Education is taken for granted. Teaching shops are different from building character.
If you read the script, and the character's got something in it that you relate to, then I am keen. But I really think, a lot of the time, my successful auditions are those where I really care about the characters.
I look to challenge myself with a character that's not like myself or anything I've done before, but I certainly don't reject roles based on how often I've done them.
Who can doubt that between the English and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course of history?
Character is the result of a system of stereotyped principals.
I'd love to play a gangster but I think people might say I looked a bit too young and cheeky to play a character who'd just blown someones head off!
I was in two episodes playing Christopher Reeve's character's emissary. They wanted to have my character announce Dr Swan's death, which I thought was exploitative.
And that's what I really love, is finding a script and fantasizing and going to a different world and kind of portraying a character that is interesting. Because other lives interest us, that's why we read magazines like 'People' and try and fascinate and drool over what other people are doing.
And I tell ya, when I sit in that sound booth and started reading the script and starting to get into the character, man, it's an easy jump for me, because I understand what it's all about.
