Quotes About Roles

I generally play villains once every three or four years by choice because I get offered villainous roles a lot, because of the way I look and whatever. And I tend to avoid them because I think you can end up in a cul-de-sac of your own making if you're cast in that.

It's true in the beginning I started playing villains, and I think that's pretty clear, because if you don't conventionally look a certain way and you've got a certain kind of presence when you're young, then what's available to you is character roles, and the best character roles when you're young tend to be villains.

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.

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.

People think that my favorite roles to do are villains, but I find comedy to be the most challenging and rewarding.

I've had my share of villains and played some fairly nasty characters. But I've been acting for so long. I started out as the girl next door. Now I'm the grandmother next door.

I certainly have never been an actor who can play the Everyman guy - or, I don't tend to get those parts. I've tended to play eccentrics. I've played a lot of villains, of course.

Villains are always the best roles, but that meant that for months afterwards, all I got offered were absolute cads and bounders and really nasty pieces of work, as well as a lot of people who only had one arm. Such is the limited imaginative power, you see, of a great many casting directors.

Everyone says villains are thankless parts, but those are really the best roles.

Why can't I ever play a nice, normal, salt-of-the-earth type? Is there something I should know? It's fun to play villains and character roles, of course - but I'm sure it's also fun to be a really big star and play the lead in everything, where all you have to do is show up and not blink.

Part of what's interesting about the 'Star Wars' world is, villains are complex, obviously, and they occupy, as in life, different roles within different organizations.

We are tagged as comedians, villains, etc. but those are just character traits of a role and there is no need for differentiation.

After making my stage debut aged nine as Macduff's small son in 'Macbeth,' I had played a number of parts, from 'Twelfth Night's Viola to 'The Merchant Of Venice's Portia'.

I loved doing Shakespeare. My two favorite roles, in fact, have been Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I guess you could say I've been in my share of violent movies.

I would love to play Mary in 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' or 'Virginia Woolf' or a comedy - just, like, a slapstick comedy.

Virginia has no shortage of pioneering women who have made history by overcoming doubt and discrimination, by daring to step into roles that had never been held by a woman, and by breaking down barriers for those who would follow.

The more visibility, the more opportunities for Asian-American actors to play great roles. It goes to the studios opening up roles they might not have considered Asian actors for. The talent is there. I don't think there needs to be one superstar, but having more roles open up, that's the way changes happen.

The greatest impediments to changes in our traditional roles seem to lie not in the visible world of conscious intent, but in the murky realm of the unconscious mind.

I'm thrilled that ESPN has been the leader in trying to find opportunities for women in visible and non-traditional roles.

And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.

All the same, they [young, twenty-somethings] can't help feeling that the aged and even the infirm have somehow elected that condition ... or have as it were been assigned those roles ... so that they ... can play their youthful-energetic, all but immutable selves.

In functional families the roles are chosen and are flexible. The members have the choice of giving up the roles. In dysfunctional families the roles are rigid.