Quotes About Characterization

If you know your characters well enough, you aren't trying to grasp for storylines. You're really thinking about their flaws and their passions and what they're chasing.

All the other characters are so well-rounded, and it's just frustrating because female characters aren't. It's not that they're badly written, they're just underwritten. They have no internal monologues; they could be absolutely anyone.

When I debut on television with 'Meri Awaaz Hi Pehchaan Hai,' there were a lot of things that I experienced as an actor and felt that one could get into more nuances in terms of characterization. At the end of it, I wept non-stop for 15 minutes to get out of that character. It was that kind of emotional bond.

The most real characters in a great play are those who are so meticulously drawn that the audience could predict how many pairs of shoes they might have in their closet or how many close friends they had in grade school. Have any of our public figures been as fully developed in the media?

I can't tell you why I keep getting asked to play gay characters, but I never really considered 'gay' as an adjective, as a playable thing. Maybe it's an element of the character, but it just describes a preference.

Some people say, 'Well you're a man; how do you write about women or girls when you don't know about them?' Well, I've got my imagination, and I can write about women. Yes, I'll never be pregnant and give birth to children, but I can imagine a bit of what it's like. When you create characters, it's just about making them really real to people.

How do I act so well? What I do is I pretend to be the person I'm portraying in the film or play.

When you make a film, everyone wants to define it.

Essaying different characters on screen and doing justice to each role entails its own set of research and hard work.

With 'Vikings,' I had the task of making these people interesting and, to a point, sympathetic.

There is a diversity of thought and philosophy, diversity of languages and dialects, diversity of political spectrum, and there's a diversity of taste for food. I don't label or characterize Jews in any way.

I think 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' is a good example of a film where you have to juggle a whole lot of information to follow that story, and even if you haven't read the book, it seems to go pretty well. And that is a film where the characters didn't meet until 74 minutes into the film, not on page 17.

While using generics, people describe themselves as who they want to be, not who they actually are. You need to get specific to bring out the edge cases.

Many of us may not know too much about our characters, but we tell the reader altogether too much.

There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.

I think we tried to make a film [Moon] that was about human beings as opposed to going from one special effects set piece to the next one, which is what a lot of science fiction films these days do.

People don't like to change their minds. Once they perceive you one way, that's it. They kind of file you away in their minds as a certain kind of person. You cannot become a different person in their minds.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature

I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set most high.

A part of my job, when I'm playing a character and approaching a role, is to rationalize and to not judge whatsoever.

Whenever you're going to play a real person, you run the risk of well, everybody in the world kind of has an image of what that person is and who he should be and so you really have to do your homework.

The thing about villains is most people play them with the shifty eyes and all that, whereas I play them as good guys. 'Cos everyone thinks they're a goodie, don't they?

If Mitt Romney is vanilla, Chris Christie is three hefty scoops of Rocky Road topped with whipped cream, Red Bull, and gravel.

The producers probably won't like this, but I always describe her as Peppermint Patty on acid.