Joel Edgerton Quotes

Every actor has to love and loathe the character he plays.

Part of my strength as an actor comes from what I've learned all these years: when you play a villain, you try to get the light touches; when you play a hero, you try to get in some of the warts.

Sometimes when you're playing a very intense character, a disturbed character, you find other layers. That's much more interesting to me, rather than just playing 'intense.' I find it too boring.

It's only over time that you get to exploring or adding nuances to the character. Like my part in 'Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara' - I am so not the person who wears high heels and totters about like a poodle.

'Deadwood' was just a wonderful opportunity for me. Outside of my own things that I've written, I hadn't had the opportunity to play a character with that amount of depth and range.

Being a good actor is sort of understanding the complexity of the human psyche and also knowing that we are none of us perfect.

It's really rare to come across a character, a show, or a movie that allows you to completely play four or five different characters within a season, let alone a week.

When a character has so many secrets and so much inner life, it's a joy to play those characters because you can use your craft.

I love playing characters who are multilayered and multidimensional and have a darkness to them, which makes them more realistic and more fun to play.

I really want to work on characters that have a lot of complexity and you don't always get that in comic book movies because they're not character explorations. I have nothing against movies like that, but I do see them as kind of like a cheeseburger.

The audience basically likes complex characters, and bringing out the complexities is the actor's job. The audience doesn't have the script, the actor does.

I think you end up writing things you like. I like seeing actors playing two different parts at the same time. I think it's interesting. It kind of shows you two sides of a person.

I want to give my characters nuance.

It's always fun to layer a character, to make the character a little bit more dynamic than it is on paper.

My job is to take out the negativity from a positive guy and take out the positivity from a negative guy. I don't play positive or negative roles. This is what I find fascinating about acting.

I feel my job as an actor is to explore all sides of humanity.

We're not one thing, as human beings, so any character that is written uni-dimensional, that's just a shallow character with shallow writing and shallow acting.

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.

Mostly, I have to say as an actor, to find a character that's been rich enough for 10 seasons of shows... that's very rare.

For me, I'm always looking for the opportunity for a character that challenges me and lets me play two for the price of one.

Usually I'm frustrated when I look at my films and I don't believe that I've made a real transformation beyond my usual sets of gestures and expressions. I still have this nagging feeling that it's me, that I didn't create a unique character.

I try to steal from the best. Suck it all in. 'Taxi Driver' is really a bible for film actors, a master class. A lot of emotional power, a lot of emotional depth but it's contained and you just see the tip of the iceberg.

There's no particular role that comes to mind that I'd like to take on, but for me, it's about playing interesting characters and not just two-dimensional ones.

As actors, we want to choose somebody who has conflicts. I can't be always playing the girl next door. What's the challenge in that?

Disney acting is a little more difficult than many people think it is. People feel like the characters aren't deep, but as an actor, you try to do everything you can do the best of your ability.