The character of the computer whiz is not one that would normally be associated with me.
Character is just another word for having a perfectly disciplined and educated will. A person can make his own character by blending these elements with an intense desire to achieve excellence. Everyone is different in what I will call magnitude, but the capacity to achieve character is still the same.
I think what we've been able to do with 'Longmire' is balance this procedural with a bit of a soap opera, and it's a character study of this character, Walt Longmire, and the people around him.
For 'The Haunting Hour,' I thought it would be a lot of fun. It was great to play this cool kid role. My episode is called 'The Intruders' and my character is this mean, angry teenager because her younger brother was just born and he gets all of the attention. She's always playing tricks on her family, and there are some cool twists.
I feel like a good director provokes you to ask questions about your character, but doesn't answer them for you.
In my case I don't mind playing a character that irritates people or makes people question my sanity.
I stare out the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one's imagination and one's goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving.
As an actor, when you want to capture the spirit of the character, and the character exists in all of the iterations slightly differently, you work towards getting a sense of what the creators wanted to do, you know? Then, you work off of that.
Actors are always identified with certain parts. To some, Marlon Brando will always be the Godfather. That's just how it is, whether the character happens to be your own personal favorite role or not. You can't ever get away from it.
While you are improvising, you need to be prepared, and I like to have a sense of who the character is, what she likes to read, where she grew up, where we went to school, and what she has for breakfast, so that when I go to set, I'm free to explore.
I really think I tried to capture the essence of the comics: what I thought would be the essence of Elektra. And then, as any character that I play, I really tried to dig inside me and try to reach real emotions and transpose that in her world, in who she is.
After 'Game of Thrones,' having a character like that, that's like the pinnacle of your career.
That's what sets apart one actor from another, and that you can't teach. You can't give someone that. When you're working, putting a character together, or in a scene, that's where things will happen that you have to have the intuition to notice them, and to register them.
The more deeply connected you are with the people that you're working with, the better the work and the character, and then, I think, that really translates to life. It will help you in life to be more grounded and genuine.
'Cinderella' the cartoon scared me. I watched the bits with the mice, and the scenes with the stepsisters ripping her dress apart scared me. Cinderella was never even my favorite character in 'Into the Woods.'
In 'Tintin,' it's like a live-action role. You're living and breathing and making decisions for that character from page 1 to page 120, the whole emotional arc. In an animated movie, it's a committee decision. There are 50 people creating that character. You're responsible for a small part.
As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.
Every ongoing character has to start somewhere.
Only twice have I really had a hard time leaving a character. The first was my character in 'Rome' and then in 'Homeland.'
Before we ever had a script or anything, I was attracted to the idea of playing a character that housed within himself two opposing traits.
The screenplay has to be gripping. That's when the film will work. Then, I see how much I can relate to the character I'm playing.
There is a degree of role-playing in modeling, for sure, and you're also in a high-profile job - there are lots of similarities for sure. But when I'm acting, I've got to try and be present, and I've got to be emotionally committed to a character, both physically and intellectually.
'District 9', 'Elysium' and 'Chappie' were all born out of some visual concept first. 'Chappie' is the imagery, because I think I'm a visual person first, of this ridiculous robot character. It's much more comedy based and in an unusual setting.
There are probably only a certain number of people who can understand or tolerate how long a job will take and what demands it puts on you. And why should they? It breeds a strange kind of selfishness immersing yourself in a character for so long.
The thing is, even if you're playing sort of a heightened character and playing inside sort of a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters.
You've got to internalize the character. You've got to learn the words. These are separate things, but they work together.
The whole thing was an actor's dream - getting a character that tickles you so much you can't wait to act as him.
I didn't grow up a huge fan of the Western genre because there was never a female character to relate to or look up to.
I'm doing a film called 'Black Mass' where I play James Bulger. The reason to play him is obvious to me. He's a fascinating character. It's not like anything I've done before on that level. I'm very excited to slide into that skin for a little bit.
You're a person a lot longer before and after you're a professional athlete. People always say to me, 'Your image is this, your image is that.' Your image isn't your character. Character is what you are as a person. That's what I worry about.
In acting, you have a writer, a director, a character - you're working through being another person - and the irony I always tell people is when I acted early on as a teenager, it actually kept me out of trouble.
I'm all about the story. If I like the character and I think the story's entertaining, I'll do it.
As I write each new Thorne novel, I'm determined that whatever is happening plot-wise, a new layer of the onion will be peeled away and reveal something about Thorne that is surprising to me as much as anyone else. If I can remain interested in the character, then hopefully the reader will stay interested, too.
Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.
When you play the same character for a long time, you have a shorthand. You get onto the set, you put on your outfit and two-thirds of your work is done because you've built on that work for so many years.
What I perceive in science fiction is that it's more about how everything looks than what's going on, which I think is just difficult if you're an action character. I think they are about character, not about what it looks like.