When you create a show, and create characters, these people are like children to you.
When I'm writing a novel, one of the things I do is get big poster boards. They're actually canvases that artists use. And I keep all the characters' names on them. If you write a big novel, there's a lot of characters.
The characters are that vague TV high school age, but they'll be in high school as long as we need them to be.
I think in Vice and American Me I played very silent, rigid characters and people remember them.
For me, whenever I would see a lot of 'black films,' I didn't feel represented in it. I didn't feel connected to the characters or the situations or the humor.
All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.
The things we always disengage with are one-sided stories or one-sided characters. They're very boring. When you feel like you're being hit over the head, you disengage.
We were going for simplicity with the Minions and, frankly, I think that's a huge appeal of the characters. They're essentially pills with goggles. A child can draw them quite easily.
I think from the time I was a kid I've been an entertainer. I've always had the ability to play characters. When I came to California, I was overwhelmed that you could do this and get paid for it, make a living on it, and be creative within this art form.
We started shooting, and then Jodie found out she was pregnant. Forest broke it to me - he'd gone to work and heard it on the radio! It seemed like the movie was doomed. But, like these characters, there was a disregard for all the signs along the way.
My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.
A lot of times in movies, especially in sequels, the characters become caricatures and just sort of improv machines and joke machines, rather than people you can actually connect to.
I'm driven by the idea of characters and the song-cycle form is similar to a musical.
My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.
I'm just looking always for characters that change, because I want to get better, as an actor and as a person.
I sometimes feel like I could do another job. Anything. Maybe because as an actress you're playing different characters, everything feels possible.
I have a thing for working with wounded characters.
I'm much more low-key than the characters I've played.
Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.
If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.
Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research.
When I was a little kid, I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there, and a mummy. When they were all hassling him, this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them, 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.
That's the great thing about a series: you're driving to work, and you have an idea for a story for your characters, and you can go into work, and it's gonna be a television show. I mean that's what's great about the job.
I quite like some of the movies that have many characters in them.
I didn't realize it at first, but the Doctor is in the same spirit as those natural 'outsider' characters 'Star Trek' series have, like Spock and Data.
Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people that I've met, my family, or myself. Being a writer, you can draw only from what you know. I am lucky to have really rich and interesting people in my family for, you know, interesting family nights and great characters.
I always find it actually funny that the analysis is that the characters I play in comedies are the manchild, the adolescent, characters that refuse to grow up. And yet, if you look back in the history of comedy all the way back to the Marx brothers, that's a big part of comedy.
I don't need all that much - I just need to know who my characters are and what kind of jam they're going to get into, and I'll write myself out of their jam.
There is a common theme, though, in the stories I have told, which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.
We've carried that over into the visual development as well. We've designed quite an exotic cast of characters, but the last thing we want is to dictate to the players how their PCs should look. What we want to do is inspire.
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 have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
I always wanted to play characters, and that was definitely one - a Russian spy.
We're always trailing, as far as the amount of roles that are written for us and the films that are being made that have black characters in them. I don't know if that's going to change.
There's the theory that nudity doesn't really make something sexy; the characters and their relationship make it sexy.
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.
