Quotes About Complexity

As you do on any cable series, if they introduce you as the villain, then you better start working towards making him a really good guy, or if they introduce you as a really good guy, then you better start working towards being the villain. Your character has to go somewhere, or else they become very uninteresting.

For me, especially with the villain, it's not very interesting to write a guy who is just 100% bad.

The character Jang Joon-woo isn't a simple villain. He is multi-dimensional.

I like ambiguity because you may be the villain in someone else's story and the hero in your own, and I think very often, African-American characters are either one thing or the other. You shouldn't have to be perfectly good or perfectly bad. You don't even have to be magical.

I think that if a villain's done right, you don't necessarily have to like their actions, but you have to understand them.

The characters that have greys are the more interesting characters. The hero who sometimes crosses the line and the villain who sometimes doesn't are just much more interesting.

Actors always want to play the villain role at least once in their life.

It's interesting sometimes when an audience can empathize with a villain.

'Profit' was an intriguing fellow that couldn't be approached as a villain or a hero. The challenge in hanging a show on a character like Jim Profit was that we knew that we were in for a rough reception.

I've played a lot of bad guys in my time, especially in movies. It's delightful playing the villain. It's almost the most interesting and most complicated role in a film.

Operas elucidate, in a way sometimes absent in other theatrical productions, the very human fact that in every hero, there is a thread of duplicity. In every villain, there is another side to consider: We don't have to like him or her, but we are compelled to think about motivation.

I don't think of 'Macbeth' as the villain. I don't think of 'King Lear' as the villain. I don't think of 'Hamlet' as the villain. I don't think of 'Travis Bickle' as the villain.

If someone's a cartoon villain, you can dismiss them, but if they behave despicably but you kind of like them, they really get under your skin.

If you don't care for the villain, if you don't love him and hate him at the same time, then he's just boring.

Some people who've read my story think I had a terrible childhood and that I was neglected or even abused, while others feel that my parents, while certainly flawed, also had truly wonderful qualities. And that's the way it should be, because in real life two people can look at the same president and one will see a hero and the other a 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.

A lot of the time, a moral compass is all that separates a hero from being a villain; otherwise, the two are very much the same. Both are generally the richest and most complex characters, and they get to have all the fun. I guess it's those types of roles that I ultimately gravitate towards.

Back in the '30s, '40s and '50s, you had clear-cut heroes, clear-cut supervillains. Today, you have more of a blend, more of a gray area between the two. You have the rise of the sympathetic villain and the rise of the antihero.

I did a play once where a reviewer said, 'Martin Freeman's too nice to play a bad guy.' And I thought: 'Well, bad guys aren't always bad guys, you know?' When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it's false.

I hope we can see African American characters as the diva, as the villain, and also as the praying mother. We are all of those things. We tended to only be the best friend or the neighbor in everybody's sitcom.

I think a villain who starts his morning looking in the mirror, wringing his hands, and going, 'How can I be evil today?' is not an interesting villain. An interesting villain is a person who you understand on some level, I think.

The best strategy for making people care about what happens is if they empathize with both sides. If you just have a Villain with a capital V, it becomes very two-dimensional.

I find that when I watch films where the villain is more complex, I find that it makes the heroes more complex and ultimately, in the story, more interesting.

I would love to play a negative guy, play the villain. It is always interesting to have shades to your character.