Quotes About Empathy

It's not that fun to just play a villain, without any reasoning behind it.

You can't think that you're playing a villain, or you'll end up with a cartoon. You have to think about him as a person and a hero.

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.

The challenge is, how do you take someone who's supposed to be a villain and make that appealing and lovable? You have to empathize with him and put yourself in his shoes and root for him and want him to have the things he wants.

No actor can play a villain if they don't sympathise with him or her - otherwise the character just becomes a two-dimensional caricature.

I find the trick to playing a villain is that you can't be bad for the sake of being bad. It has to be rooted in some sort of heartbreak.

Sometimes someone that is the 'villain' in your life, when you look deeper and you think of what their issues are and why they behave like that and where they came from - they become less of a villain and more of someone that you can understand.

I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.

With any villain, you have to see things from their point of view and understand that they think what they're doing will make the world a better place.

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.

I don't think you can play a villain with a negative point of view.

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.

As an actor, I should justify the role given to me. So, as a villain, my job was to make people hate me.

Empathy is much bigger than sympathy. When the character is empathised with, that means you have succeeded as an actor. So even if it's a villain, the audiences don't hate you... they understand why you have turned into a villain.

When I was composing for 'The Villain,' I looked at it as a fan and came up with tunes accordingly.

Once you watch any character for nine-and-half hours, be it good, bad or grey, you tend to attach yourself with it. You always feel for the character, even if he is a villain.

I like flawed characters, and I like seeing people who are supposed to be not villains but antagonists. There are elements to them, which are really annoying, but you kind of see where they came from. You see the things that caused those inadequacies.

Even the toughest people have a backstory, and villains don't feel like they're the bad guys.

I have been thinking a lot about what we see in villains, how we relate to villains, and what it is about certain villains that we actually empathize with. Like Macbeth. We're not supposed to like a guy who kills the king and takes over, but there's something about him we're really fascinated by.

I'm always interested in getting to know people, and that means vilified people as much as those celebrated. You find out that heroes aren't always so heroic, and villains have some bit of humanity in them.

Well, I don't feel that I've played so many bad guys, and I'm rot really drawn to villains per se. I think a lot of people relate to some of my characters' inner struggles.

Let me put it this way: I definitely need to understand the villains I play. The best cause pain to anesthetize themselves against their own pain.

I'm not interested in the heroes or the villains. I'm interested in playing people.

You don't play villains like they are villains. You play them like you know exactly where they are coming from. Which hopefully you do.