Quotes About Characters

I like the wild characters. I like the idea of being a character actor without being a character actor.

My great influence has been Maurice Sendak, who drew 'Where the Wild Things Are.' His characters really interact with each other.

'Fargo,' man, with so many actors playing so many great characters, and then they do another season, and it changes all over again? It's wild.

It's nice to see a story that centers around other couples, instead of having, you know, the sassy gay friend or the funny best friend or the assistant, which is just like these stereotypical roles that tend to be put in movies.

In independent film you tend to have stories that involve more of a community, and the smaller characters are important to the story.

I love period drama as much as the next person, but there's a tendency to let all of the costume get in the way of the people.

I have this tendency to play these horrible, horrible characters.

I have a tendency to think that when you portray baddies in movies, they come out more human than good guys.

When we create female characters, I think often there is a tendency to kind of make female characters emotionally bulletproof.

The characters I play always seem eerily appropriate to where I am in my personal life at the time, and if they're not, there always tends to be this notion that I should be learning something to apply to my own life from these people.

I haven't seen the film yet because I just got in from London. In the scenes where the two characters are bantering with each other, it is like bobbing at the net in tennis.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

What I realized is that it doesn't matter how big or small your film is. The actual filmmaking process, the actual storytelling, it's still the same thing. It's still all about creating characters that you like and creating moments that get you excited or get you tense.

The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know.

There's a sense you get from the Coens' work, like 'No Country for Old Men,' where you put these characters in situations, and you just let this painful amount of time take place. Part of the tension is just how long it takes to get out of that scene.

When you are producing for ABC, you are producing for a big tent network. So when you are thinking about your story lines and characters, you are thinking about broad appeal. When you are producing for a niche interest, you are producing for a different audience.

Yes, the first job I had at the studio was Snow White. I don't like the term particularly, but I got stuck with the human characters. They just didn't have that many people who could draw humans.

I take things on a day to day basis when it gets really hectic. But I do think long term and I'm looking forward to the next couple of years when I do start producing my own films with my production company and playing some characters that are older and that's really exciting to me.

Sometimes, the smaller roles in movies can be the most interesting. If you only take the stance that you'll only play central characters in movies, you'll find yourself not being able to indulge in that morally grey terrain that makes support characters so rich and interesting.

I was Obi-Wan multiple years in a row. Alec Guinness' Obi-Wan. I was a Dalmatian once because I loved '101 Dalmatians,' and I think I was a Care Bear once and maybe a Spartan cheerleader from the 'SNL' skit. I'm terrible with Halloween, because I come up with these elaborate costumes and never follow through.

I'm drawn to playing characters who are terribly flawed and have no idea about it.

I wasn't terribly aware of Catwoman. She was a DC comics character and as a kid, I wasn't terribly fond of the DC comics characters. I was a Marvel boy.

I'm terribly particular about what I read: lush writing, secondary world or seriously far-out science fiction, strong worldbuilding, dynamic characters. I need to have it all for it to work for me.

I binge-watched this show 'Damages.' Glenn Close and Rose Byrne are so good. Lily Tomlin is in it. You see all these great actors, and the writing is terrific. There are a lot of shows like that.