One of the most interesting female characters I've written about was Meg Riddoch, the lead character in 'The Thompson Gunner'.
I have too much respect for the characters I play to make them anything but as real as they can possibly be. I have a great deal of respect for all of them, otherwise I wouldn't do them. And I don't want to screw them by not portraying them honestly.
The thing I was always most protective of was my mystery. I worried that if I gave too much of myself, then I would limit the characters I could fall into.
I never want to make any characters one-dimensional, especially as women can often be portrayed as the dark one or the evil one.
My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'
I don't want to be known for anything other than the fact that I play characters in movies.
I love to start characters in a place where you think you know them. We can make all kinds of assumptions about them and think they have no redeeming qualities, but like everyone, they're complex.
How I would describe my characters is absolutely different from how I would describe myself.
The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up.
I was always inventing characters and making up stories.
For me, it's infinitely more interesting to read or watch a character making decisions they think are right, but the audience knows differently, and seeing that disconnect. The only way characters can grow and learn is by making the wrong decisions and then learning from them.
Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.
The endless teen franchises that come out of Hollywood... more often than not, the central character doesn't have any discernible character traits. They're just the young, good-looking guy who goes on this journey. They're always played by fantastic young actors, but ultimately, they're not very interesting characters.
My characters are not role-model Muslims, but they struggle to make choices using Muslim logic.
I like to try to make the characters I play be as human as possible.
When you play characters, you shouldn't just be putting on their characteristics - you should be finding it inside yourself.
I must have been 10 or 11, but anything Dana Carvey ever did, I just really loved. He was on for a long time, I don't really know when that era was. I could watch Dana Carvey with my parents, they loved him too. They loved all his characters.
Some of my favourite characters have been people like Masha in 'Three Sisters' and Elena in 'Uncle Vanya.'
I came from the stage so it was a different kind of acting, or a different arena of acting, and I just loved to do it as a kid. It's really gratifying to get to create these different characters and to get to create different voices and to get to wear different clothes.
Basically the children who watch it just see the little characters they love, and so they're not discerning about whether it looks great or it's a great story or anything.
You have very accurately described the difficulty of presenting my books on film: many of my characters are alone most of the time, and when they do talk, what they say is mostly lies. That can make for a pretty confusing film.
What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.
Acting is still, of course, what I love to do most. The beauty of it is that by changing characters, it never gets boring.
Acting is a job you can learn a lot in. You get to play lots of different characters with different professions and different backgrounds; they come from different places than you do, so it's really fun when you're immersing yourself in that world of that person to learn about how other people's lives are.
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
With both Caddyshack and Vacation, it's not like the subjects were serious enough that they engaged my interest for another round. I love the characters, and the actors were great, but I didn't see the need to make another Vacation movie.
There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and 'live' with the characters.
I'm a nice middle-class girl in real life, and I'm a mom and a grandma, and I usually play sweet characters.
One of the main reasons I write fiction is to try to understand what life is like for people other than myself, to try to see the world through my characters' eyes. I often find that I'm able to understand certain emotional truths about my own life by exploring things from different vantages.
I felt they had really moved the characters in a direction that was very interesting. The family had really felt the impact of what had happened to the.
When I started, there was more of a cultural assumption that many readers would find gay characters irrelevant or repugnant.
You have to be able to toss the thing out. You can't fall in love with your characters, and you have to know when to fight - and when to quit.
Traditionally, lots of vagrants and unemployable characters wind up working in kitchens.
Johnny Colt is a character, and most people in Lynyrd Skynyrd are characters, so he fits in great with us. He's got an attitude, man, and I love it, and that's what we need.
I generally like grey roles. My interpretation of drama is different from the popular perception. Acting, for me, is not about overplaying, it is about concealing. I like flawed characters that people relate to. I would never do a romcom.
From beginning to end it's about keeping the energy and the intensity of the story and not doing too much and not doing too little, but just enough so people stay interested and stay involved in the characters.
