Quotes About Characterization

I also try very hard to create characters - both heroes and villains - with psychological depth.

A lot of times, female characters - particularly the villains - come off as very one-dimensional. They get the short shrift in that they're only given the snappy comeback, or they're relegated to a very stereotypical role. I want to know what's driving them - that's what's really interesting.

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.

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.

I don't necessarily prefer playing villains. I know a lot of people say they are more fun, but if the scriptwriter has done their work well, you can find something realistic in a villain and find the mistakes in a hero - it's all down to the writing.

Somebody - and I'm going to guess it was Hitchcock - once said that everyone has their reasons. If you remember that, as a writer, you'll write better than average villains.

I would absolutely love to do something with Viola Davis or Meryl Streep. I just think both of those women fall so deep into their characters that you are no longer looking at the actresses, you are looking at the characters they embraced.

I don't like characters who are either good or bad. I just don't experience that in life, so my writing hasn't evolved that way.

You read about somebody, and it doesn't really matter whether or not they really exist - the point is that you get into them like real characters.

I like to play non-cardboard characters. I try and bring out the many complex layers in the personality of the characters I play.

When you find you don't like a character, you just type four letters and he's dead.

A black character is much more than just a black character; he's a character, period. So show the world as it is. Even with all your artistic license, you make a political choice.

I think right after 'Up in the Air' everyone wanted me to play the girl from 'Up in the Air,' and it took a little while for people to think of me as an actress from a film that they liked instead of just that character.

Who your characters are, how they behave, what they believe, how they think, what they do, and the ways in which they feel are in your control. Why create characters who only raise shrugs? In

When I'm supposed to be writing, I end up making up names," says Lucas of the mercenary's christening. "I have a couple of little books that are lists of names. Whenever I think of a name, whenever I'm in the shower, I'm with friends, or see a sign, I write it down in my little book. So when I have a new character, sometimes I'll go down the list and pick a name out that seems to fit that particular character.

Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside.

When I do a character, I try to base it on someone I have met or an experience I've had.

If you have a handlebar mustache, that is pretty much all you are. You are a delivery system for a handlebar mustache.

Mr. Hogan is not tall himself, at five feet ten inches

It's funny, people talk about the characters they play and who do you sort of see yourself as or which ones maybe were closest to you and in some ways.

I steal things from people, characteristics, and I just stock them in my head like a library to use for characters in the future.

Always know your protagonists inside and out. As a writer, show us things about them we've never before considered; make us care about who they are and what they want, so much that it's gut-wrenching to see them roadblocked and exhilarating to see them triumph over obstacles. You have to live inside them, through them--inhabit them as an actor would and tell stories about things that matter immensely to the both of you.

Even today I meet people who think of me automatically as a tough, insensitive, coarse guy named Stanley Kowalski.

People often say that an actor 'plays' a character well, but that's an amateurish notion. Developing a characterization is not merely a matter of putting on makeup and a costume and stuffing Kleenex in your mouth. That's what actors used to do, and then called it a characterization. In acting everything comes out of what you are, or some aspect of who you are.