Quotes About Portrayal

The nature of men and women - their essential nature - is so vile and despicable that if you were to portray a person as he really is, no one would believe you.

I feel like a lot of characters on TV don't have the time to tell that many aspects of a character's story and personality.

In every character you play, as much as you hate to admit it as an actor, but there's an element of you that you bring to it.

I don't try to make actors play crazy characters. I like where there's a certain element of who they are and truth to their performances.

I've got to tell you, I've played real characters before and people always bring up this word 'impersonation,' and I'm never entirely sure what it means.

I think viewers realize that people are a lot more three-dimensional than TV has traditionally portrayed them, particularly in news.

Researching real people and doing them, I think, is harder than anything else. You don't want to do a caricature of them and you don't want to do an impression. You just want to do the best you can, in terms of presenting their views and a general impression of the guy. That's the hardest thing to do, real people.

I like playing the villain.

No actor can play a villain if they don't sympathise with him or her - otherwise the character just becomes a two-dimensional caricature.

I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.

The difficult part of writing about someone you don't admire is that it's easy to demonize them. What you get then is a cackling villain, twirling their mustache at every dastardly deed they commit.

As an actor I like to play everything from villain to comedian.

Playing a villain would be great.

I've always had an incredible interest in the villains, which are a lot more fun to play.

I play disturbed people a lot, but always with a bit of distance or tongue-in-cheek. Most of the villains I play are essentially harmless.

But you see, I have played more good guys than I have played villains.

I don't know why I always get to play these guys who have few redeeming features. But don't knock it. Villains are much more fun.

I don't play just villains. I like to have parts that are not simply villains.

Most actors will tell you that villains are the most interesting to play.

I do play villains.

In American films, Russians are often portrayed like cartoon villains without clear motivations.

Violence is used to portray what happens in a film. It only helps portray the actors and what they do. I think it is more about the story, when you have something to play off of.

We don't have any rules about how we depict violence, or how much violence is in a movie. It's a calibration on a case-by-case basis.

'Vikings' has been so many different challenges, and some of that is, at times, you have to be big and imposing and violent and vicious, and then you have be pulled back and withdrawn and just more layers and more time to portray those layers, too.