Quotes About Portrayal

Never does a man portray his own character more vividly than in his manner of portraying another.

[The Player is] not a truthful indictment of Hollywood. It's much uglier than I portrayed it, but nobody would've been interested if I'd shown just how sadistic, cruel and self-orientated it is.

If I don't make it, don't let them cast some asshole to play me in the movie version of this

To my mind, the actor has this great responsability of playing another human being… it's like taking on another person's life and you have to do it as sincerely and honestly as you can.

Especially in entertainment geared toward young people, the women are much stronger than they used to be. There's not really the damsel in distress anymore. I think the stereotype still possibly lives in different genre pictures but, in entertainment for the younger generation, they're used to women being equal and being strong. I think if you don't portray that, it would be kind of weird.

But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we both emerge with enough well-rounded, spuriously detailed actuality that you are forced to believe in us. I do not want to practise such sleight of hand. You must be content only with glimpses of our outlines, as if you had caught sight of our reflections in the looking-glass of somebody else's house as you passed by the window.

I believe in method acting. Whenever I'm working on a character, I start behaving like him. I start doing these things which the character would normally do. Maybe that's the way I function as an actor, and I believe in it. And that's how I try and portray a character.

Whenever you're going to play a real person, you run the risk of well, everybody in the world kind of has an image of what that person is and who he should be and so you really have to do your homework.

The thing about villains is most people play them with the shifty eyes and all that, whereas I play them as good guys. 'Cos everyone thinks they're a goodie, don't they?

Dontel Benjamin on 'Eastbound' is a loud-mouth, braggadocios, crazy man, while Roy on 'Rake' is a very deliberate, thoughtful man, and he doesn't scream a lot.

All my stories were usually titled, 'White House Says,' 'President Bush Wants,' and I relied on transcripts from the briefings. I relied on press releases that were sent to the press for the purpose of accurately portraying what the White House believed or wanted.

'The Butler' has virtually nothing in common with its source material, the life of White House butler Gene Allen, except for the fact that the main character of the film and Allen were both black butlers in the White House.

I essay a negative or a positive character depending on whether it's a principle role and how much it drives the movie.

Abortion opponents know full well that the public would not abide putting women in prison en masse. Politically, it's more palatable to portray them as irrational, ignorant, and childlike, perhaps even temporarily insane.

Why would a novel - which is all about the inward processes of people's developing feelings and developing relationships - why would you be able to portray that in pictures with as few words as possible, which is what the best films are?

The writer and the director are ultimately responsible for what is portrayed and glorified in a film. Then comes the producer.

There's no set rule, but when you look at the script, you start thinking about this person and how to create this human being on screen. You dig deeper into a script.

A lot of the bad guys I've played just haven't had much dimension to them.

It's very important to be able to distinguish the actors from the characters they play.

You're playing a character in a drama who happens to be based on someone who existed. It's never going to 'be' that person, but it's based on someone well-known, and you want to create enough of that person for it not to be a distraction.

Building a character - nothing gives me more high than the process of exploring someone else's life on screen.

It's impossible to capture every single facet of someone's personality in a film.

The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them.

The movies I used to watch, I remember always being so angry because I felt like I, as a teenage girl, was never truly represented in a film. There were always bits of me that were represented - I'd watch 'Juno' and be like, 'Oh, well part of me is like that, but it's still not the whole thing.'