Quotes About Morality

And still, villains are also superheroes; they just fight for the other side, but theyre still superheroes.

It's fun playing villains. It's people who are not held by any moral constraints - or any constraints, for that matter. It's a chance to be completely off the leash and do things that you never could in real life.

Villains never know they are villains in a picture so I play this like I'm the nicest guy in the world.

We love a tale of heroes and villains and conflicts requiring a neat resolution.

I can be a teddy bear, but more people tend to see me as the other side of the coin, and that has to do with casting, more Iago than Hamlet. But I don't play villains; I play people doing the right thing for the circumstances and time.

Generally speaking, I would say villains are a little more exciting to play, but if you get a flawed hero, then that can almost be just as amazing.

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

People are much more complicated in real life, but my characters are as subtle and nuanced as I can make them. But if you say my characters are too black and white, you've missed the point. Villains are meant to be black-hearted in popular novels. If you say I have a grey-hearted villain, then I've failed.

Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind. People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terrible things people do in terrible situations. Drama is failing if it doesn't do that.

I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to heroes who do bad things and to villains who think they're the good guys, but I do find that moral ambiguity and conflict makes for great characters.

Shakespeare's villains are fabulous because none of them know that they are villains. Well, sometimes they do.

Villains are fun. I think the important thing in playing them is that they don't see themselves as villains. It lets you be a little more expansive.

Are people raised to be villains or vilified like I have become?

There are some characters in 'The Names' who are very much heroes and others who can only be called villains. But generally, as we get to know them, we see most of the characters are, or at least become, quite nuanced.

Unalloyed heroes and unalloyed villains make me suspicious.

I think many villains have the burden of not being very human.

I was always fascinated by the Torah, the Bible, in terms of story telling: heroes and villains, morality and flaws. There's no better epic. Also, being part Latin and Jewish means I have a sense of the theatrical. There were always a lot of people in my house. My home was always filled with a lot of storytellers.

Both villains and heroes are a bit boring, really, unless they're flawed and broken somehow. If they're not flawed and broken, then clearly they need to be broken and made flawed. That's what an author does if he or she has any dignity.

To me, the more interesting villains are the ones you can, in some sense, relate to or sympathize with at times. Maybe you sympathize with them one moment; the next moment, they do something truly atrocious, and you feel bad you ever sympathized with them in the first place.

In thinking about it, the villains often have a little bit more range because their morality is different. You can have just a really good time as an actor, and there is just more there that you can explore on that side of the story.

I don't think villains think they are villains.

I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn't know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don't think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.

I don't like villains who are just villains. People who are just there to be bad - ugh - so annoying.

You go back to look over the body of my work, and there are no archetypal villains in my books.