I love Los Angeles, and it's been very good to me, but if everyone is running around telling the stories, who's living them? You don't play characters that are celebrities - you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank's blocked.
Most people just half-watch TV. They watch TV while they are doing many other things in the environment of their home. So, what they are doing goes through their ears as much as through their eyes. In television, the narrative and characters are in the foreground of everything, because you are watching TV as you do other stuff.
I think it's very hard to talk about these characters in a closed-ended, sort of non-sequel way, especially characters like The Flash and Green Lantern, which have such rich, long histories.
It's always exciting to play characters who are obsessive because all their energy is so focused on that one thing and they're eccentric because of it.
I don't think of the characters as nationalities. I do not live in India. Playing people from different backgrounds, including Indians, comes easily to me.
The story and the characters of 'Girl Online' are mine.
Don't do another show just because someone thinks that there's a dollar to be earned there. Do it because you love the characters, and you love the world, and you really, truly feel both the fans and you as a storyteller can benefit from having the second show.
I don't think I'm an actor who takes their characters home with him. But I certainly do take the preparation home.
I like three-dimensional characters - it's just more interesting when you get on set.
I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.
As a writer, I challenge myself not to tell the same story - to tackle different characters with different issues.
One of the weapons Marvel used in its climb to comic-book dominance was a willingness to invent new characters at a dizzying speed. There are so many Marvel universes, indeed, that some superheroes do not even exist in one another's worlds, preventing gridlock.
To me, it always comes down to character and script and then director. If a character belongs to me, it's mine. We belong to each other, and I feel a fierce need to tell that story, and it just so happens that a lot of these characters have been residing in pretty dark worlds.
As a massive fangirl myself, having people ship any of my characters is just beyond cool.
I often talk with other actors about that time when you've just finished a job, because I think you do take on the characteristics of some of the characters you play. Sometimes it can be a great thing and sometimes it's a bit haunting because you're not quite sure how to leave it on set. My dad talks about it as being 'de-personalised.'
Everyone thinks I live alone, but I don't. My characters all live with me.
And as much as I love the gritty characters, I like to play all sorts of characters. I'm an actor. I love to create.
I try to learn on each project, try to really feel what the characters are feeling.
I really love idiot, enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances; they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.
I connect with all of the characters in my films. That's what makes you want to make a film, that you can enter the mindset, the situation, the conflict, the contradictions.
Tortured characters are, I think, an actor's dream.
'A Bug's Life' is a really funny movie and the characters have such different personalities. The movie is happy and then gets really sad and I'm like, W'hoa, I'm feeling this way and this movie is about bugs!'
Psych yourself up until you're confident that the world will be interested in what happens to your characters. Confidence is key.
When one of my characters becomes aware of a magical element, it might be because the world is wider than we assume it to be, but it might also be a reminder to pay attention to what is here already, hidden only because it's been forgotten.
You have to find ways to relate to the characters you get to play. Put it in terms and in a context that speaks to you.
I've just always loved really good projects. The things that draw me into a new project have very little to do with genre and have more to do with the characters I'll be playing, the people I'll get to work with and things like that.
As a general thing, I've always been drawn to characters who appear to be one thing on the surface, but are actually something else underneath.
I like characters who are contradictory.
I've found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person. So from the first novel I've been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don't try to protect them in ways that aren't good for the story.
In general, the auditions I go up for are very sparse, I guess because of my ethnicity. And the characters are very similar: shy, innocent and naive; the connotations that come from the way that I look.
I am tired of our characters being so incomplete. When do we ever save the day in a film? When does a Latino actor get to be the hero?
When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.
I was so obsessed by Lisbeth Salander and all the characters, but of course if you're going to write a crime novel worthy of Stieg Larsson, you need a plot, don't you?
Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.
With my physicality and my face, I don't think I could pull off a completely righteous guy. There's something devious about my eyes. I like characters with flaws and to see how they overcome those flaws. I want to play real people, and they're flawed, not perfect.
In her previous novels, Maggie O'Farrell has often measured the distance between intimates and the unexpected intimacy of distance - geographic, temporal, cultural. In 'The Hand That First Held Mine' and 'The Distance Between Us,' characters separated by many miles or many years turn out to be joined in ways they never anticipated.
