When I was a young kid, my father was a big fan of Hollywood movies. He would make me watch movies with him, and he would explain the story and characters to me.
When I did 'Fast Times,' I felt very close emotionally to the characters. I liked those characters because they all had to work, so they were dealing with adult problems even though they were very immature, and I could relate to that.
I love the idea of writing these huge, bombastic characters; I'll stay in the superhero world as long as I can.
Since it's based on my parents, it's more emotionally close to me than some of my more surreal plays. And then I like the balance of the comic and the sad. It should play as funny, but you should care about the characters and feel sad for them.
I hope it's not all I'll ever do, but I know I've played enigmatic characters. For me, the good characters are people who get places, are devious, are cunning and tricky and hard to pin down. Obviously, if you play one and you do an okay job of it, that'll be on people's minds.
I've been lucky enough to play many different roles from darker characters to family orientated shows to comedy.
I am not one to go for traditional female roles, because I don't think traditionally female characters are very interesting, and I don't think they represent real life.
The audience has to understand that if the film is going to have any meaning for them. If they are going to empathize with the characters, they have to visualize the process of concentration involved in making every move.
Usually I like playing other people. I like finding myself through other characters. But when you do cabaret, you are yourself. I think it's the most fun, and I tell you, if somebody had told me that, I would have done it fifteen years earlier than I did.
It's not enough to hit the notes. There is no point in the singers just standing there and sounding wonderful if they're not connecting with the characters they are portraying.
It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your 'portrayal' of women. Even when I started out on 'The Office' eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women. And now, thankfully, it's completely different.
We are starting off with our own different characters and our own laws and everything, looking at Bruce Wayne and how he came to be the person that he was and how he comes to be this man that jumps around in the Bat suit.
You always take a little bit back with you at the end of the day. I always put a little bit of myself into the characters, too. You find parallels, points of connection, things like that. But I'm not an actor who gets so incredibly haunted by my characters that I can't come back.
Many of my characters struggle with loneliness, that is fair to say.
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.
The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
I'm trying to broaden my range and get different characters in each film.
A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.
I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.
I started out doing multiple characters from day one, when I got my fist job in 'Dumbo's Circus.' I'm used to getting in an argument with myself, throwing myself off a cliff, patching myself up and brushing myself off with an arm around my shoulder.
'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' by Betty Smith is one of my favorites. Even though it doesn't have any monsters or crazy fantasy in it, it's such a raw story, and I can really relate to the characters. I think it's a beautiful story.
I want to play characters that are interesting to watch.
Many great horror stories are period pieces and English actors have a facility for historic characters.
It's a very dull thing to watch, a writer at work. So dull that whole casts of characters show up just to watch the boring writer writing.
Wealth stays with us a little moment if at all: only our characters are steadfast, not our gold.
The process changes slightly from role to role. Obviously, there are different things you're called on to do. You're not digging deep for Basher Tarr like I was for Paul Rusesabagina, but at the end of the day it's still all make-believe and you still are trying as realistically as you can to depict these characters.
Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks.
We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'
What can I say: I'm a writer - I enjoy forcing pain and suffering on my characters!
But what I did think would be interesting is if we created a fictitious story of our own, and then took these stories that we had collected and assigned them to characters who would be played by actors.
It's certainly more interesting for me as an actor, but I think it's also more interesting for the audience to see three-dimensional characters, rather than just a bad guy or a good guy.
As your career goes on, you get to flex your brain a little more and play characters that are stronger and more intelligent.
Masses of girls identified with Bella in a really profound way, for want of a better word. The connection that I've seen people have - I've seen it physically. It's the characters they're flipping for.
The Indian community in Canada has integrated much better than the Indian community in United States. They've become really Canadian at the same time as keeping all their Indian characters and customs and social groups.
The whole point of having great characters is the opportunity to explore them more deeply with time, re-interpreting them for each new age.
You have to love the characters you play, even if no one else does.
