I really like 'This Side of Paradise' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think it's a cool description of a character.
When an actor gets a role, especially in series television where he really is the part, the audience never thinks of another actor playing that role. If they accept you in the role, then they can't separate the actor from the character.
Sometimes when you're playing a very intense character, a disturbed character, you find other layers. That's much more interesting to me, rather than just playing 'intense.' I find it too boring.
I was always prepared for my 'Fringe' journey to end immediately. I had only signed up for a guest role but they kept bringing me back in the third season as a recurring character. So pretty much every time I went to film a 'Fringe' episode I kind of said goodbye to the show, but then they kept bringing me back.
I was a repertory actor, which meant that I did a play every week. I was a different character every week; for a year, I was doing 40 or 50 characters.
My idea about football is to play well, but even if you can't always play well, one thing I want is your character, your spirit. That is all I can ask of you.
If a woman goes out with different men on different days, women only will question her character and call her all sort of names.
Kurt Russell is the guy you know. He's not something out of a weight-lifting magazine or a cartoon character. The closest thing to him would have been Steve McQueen.
The thing that I like about action sequences is that if they're done well, you get to know more about the character in those few minutes than you do through 10 minutes of exposition.
Once you have a central character who announces in the first five minutes of the show that he feels whooped by life and that he's had enough, I'm in. I'm hooked.
For 'Inhuman,' it's a 'chess game' series. You have a lot of pieces moving different ways at once, and it's about what they do on their own and what happens when they collide into one another. It's about long-range planning, new character creation, and trying to really build things.
I want people to think about movies and how we watch them. Let them know it's okay to question the structure or how we're sometimes duped into a false sense of normalcy. Most of all, I want people to question the old standard practices of, 'This is how the structure of something should work,' or, 'This is how a character must behave.'
Hollywood constantly wants to label you and type you into a certain category, 'Oh he's a comedy guy,' or the weirdo character guy or the villain.
When you've got good writing, you can kind of give up all the research, in a way, and start just following the emotional integrity of the journey of your character.
If you start writing to an audience you're talking down to them. I've never written for any age group, I just write character. If you can capture that you'll get the audiences, and it will be a wide range, as it is for 'Twilight,' it's a pretty wide range.
That character called 'Robin Wright' in the movie called 'The Congress' has nothing to do with me... I've never felt that way about life choices, career, etc.
I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.
It's all about being comfortable, being easy and having you be able to wear something and not having it wear you. It's classic. Every time I've tried to be bold and crazy, I feel like a Japanese animated cartoon character.
Personally, for my character, I started as the silent but deadly type.
'Sons of Anarchy' has the perfect combination of character and action.
It's so hard for me to kind of fall in love with comedy, but if something comes my way... I mean, I loved 'Weird,' I thought that was a really fun character.
There is nothing called negative character. The negativity and positivity exists in all of us.
I don't care about sympathy. I care about playing a character who's understandable and clear.
In order to make characters real - no matter what the character is doing - you have to see yourself as capable of having done that.
A rap dude has his rap persona, his hyper version of himself. Do you know Method Man's real name? Or Elton John, Marylin Monroe? You make up this character. That's kind of what we have done with Die Antwoord, playing with characters.
I didn't really look like a character actor, yet those were the roles I loved to play. If you were a character actor who didn't necessarily look like a character actor, you had to play bad guys.
What you have with the Bond movies is this character gliding over everything. The fact nothing touches him is why we all want to be him. But it also makes him a sort of superman who in the end you don't really relate to.
I think it would be amazing to be a character actor and still be a lead now and then in movies.
Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.
After 'Kong,' my knuckles have never recovered because I had to wear very heavy weights on my forearms and around my hips and ankles to get the sense of size and scale of the movement of the character... You are telling your body that you are these things and that you're feeling these thoughts and that you're experiencing these experiences.
I don't make decisions just on the character I'm supposed to play. Sometimes it's based on the director, sometimes it's based on the story, sometimes I need money, or sometimes I'm just starved to work.
When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather's rationale.
I often draw from people in my own experience to base a character on, going back to my days with Mike Leigh.
One of the first things I was taught as an actor was, 'Don't judge the character.'
I think one's character on the athletic field does not have to have anything to do with the way they are in real life.
I would love to be on a show where I'm allowed to play a character that you're not suspicious of, from the get-go, and who's someone that you can just relax with, take in and like, right off the bat.
