Quotes About Complexity

All of my characters have a glint of madness.

As an actor, my job is not to always play characters who make everybody happy. That's not interesting.

Ensemble is hard to do. It's like 3-D chess.

I like everything that is wrong about Chicago.

A grownup is a child with layers on.

Rock music was the death of jazz in a way. I know there's a bunch of people who say jazz isn't dead, but I mean, rock 'n roll, you play three chords to 20,000 people; jazz, you play 20,000 chords to three people.

There's been a lot of simple vilification of right-wing people. It's really easy to say, 'Well, you're Christian, you're anti-this and that, and I hate you.' But to me, it's more interesting to say, 'What is this person like and how do they really think?'

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

The reason I fell in love with Buffy was because of the ambiguity, because she was a superhero and a hot mess. I hadn't seen anything like her on TV - ever.

It's always difficult with the superhero stuff because you're working with characters who have been written by 100 to 200 people over the past 20 years, at least, so they never sound the same or act the same. The best approach is to try to draw the best fitting line through all of the interpretations.

'Iron Man' was this fun, poppy thing bound to make a zillion dollars. And we were the other side of a superhero movie. More complex with The Hulk being this complex character - that's what it was.

Playing a superhero isn't interesting because then you personify perfection, which is boring!

Fallible characters are more interesting than superheroes in the end.

I've never loved a character as much as I do Niska. The way she's been written is so complex, with huge amounts of light and dark. It's a really satisfying challenge to play someone who is superhuman in their intelligence and physical ability but completely naive when it comes to certain aspects of life.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

I don't believe that there's a good guy and a bad guy. Unless it's like Superman or Batman, there is no good guy and bad guy.

Looking at 'Batman v Superman' - which I can watch objectively, since I'm in it for all of two seconds - I see different layers. It is not preachy, and represents the gray we live in as human beings.

When you have a fully-realized Avatar, it's like Superman, and how do you make that interesting?

I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.

For me, creating a supply chain of what we should be eating is incredibly complicated. It's complicated to figure out how to change the food system in America.

From its very inception, Lenny Letter set out to create a supportive, positive, inclusive space on the Internet that does not shy away from complexity and nuance.

I grew up feeling Israel is very important, and I'm very supportive of Israel. At the same time, I think you can be really supportive of Israel and not look at it as a black-and-white situation.

I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We're all cruel, aren't we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that's what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with.

I am a man of contradictions, I suppose.