Quotes About Character

Shakespeare gives you these clues - these little pieces of gold dust, I call them. They tell you so much about the story, the character, the drive, the intentions. It's like a gift.

I've always been interested in character-driven pieces, and my approach to directing is through acting.

I'll look at the script and I'll try to find as many books, movies, and pieces of music that I think are going to feed each scene or the character as a whole.

Well, I think that in every character there are little bits and pieces of yourself.

At the beginning of 'The Hills,' I couldn't watch myself because I'm very critical and would pick myself to pieces. But with movies I feel like it's different because you're playing a character. So it's like watching yourself but not watching yourself.

I think there's always pieces of yourself that bleed into your character. That's inevitable.

I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

I couldn't write a female who fell to pieces every time something didn't go right in her life. She would just annoy me too much.

My characters aren't chess pieces. I don't move them around some big board. I actually care about these fictitious people.

It's hard to say what you learn acting a part. You find bits and pieces of yourself that are inside the character you play. You locate the relatable aspects of that character to your own life. So, in a way, every part you play forces you to discover things about yourself you might not have learned otherwise.

When I first heard 'A Christmas Story, the musical,' I thought, Oh, that could be really good. It just felt like it fit. Some films lend themselves well to other formats, some don't, but there are so many fantasy sequences in the film, and Ralphie's such a dreamer as a character, I thought they could really lend themselves to being set pieces.

To me, Jefferson Pierce represented every side of me. I knew that I would be able to flesh him out.

It was tough to try to be serious in front of Halle Berry and Pierce Brosnan with all this stuff in my face. There's never been a character that's looked this extreme.

I love the 'Mildred Pierce' miniseries.

If the only thing that was interesting about Jefferson Pierce is that he is African-American, I don't think we'd have much of a show.

Just in terms of when I got the script, the character I probably liked the least was Big Foster. Because even though he was central to the story and to that world, he was really written to be kind of a brute, a pig, a completely black-and-white bad guy.

No not pigeon holed me as an actor, or as a character, or as to what I could do - but what I would do... and the fact is the things you don't do are almost as important as as the things that you do.

I embrace my blackness, just as I do my conservatism and my Christianity, but I don't want to be defined or pigeonholed by any one of the many elements that make up my character.

I didn't want to be greedy. It's a mark of bad character and I always believed that pigs go the slaughterhouse.

Some people in the press don't respect people in life. I can put my head on my pillow and sleep great because I respect everyone.

'Dexter,' while the pilot shares moments with the novel that created the character of Dexter, they completely abandoned the book from that moment on.

The script that I fell in love with and adored was 'Jane the Virgin'... but every line in the pilot was essentially, 'Why did you keep my daughter a secret all of these years?' I didn't know any direction my character was going - was it going to be a dramatic character, a comedic character? - I didn't know.

I think the core of Jaime Lannister is actually that final line in the pilot when he says, 'The things I do for love.' He might do horrible things - and they are truly, some of them, horrific. There's no excuses. But he does it out of what he sees as a necessity, out of love.

For 'Orphan Black,' all I got was the pilot script, and that was enough for me. I was daydreaming about this part. I kept thinking about how certain scenes were going to play out and how these interactions were going to take place.