Bill Johnson Quotes

I try to give both my heroes and villains an emotional dimensionality which provides the motivation for their actions.

It was new to play a woman who plays with her sincerity, and who is a seductress, a manipulator and a liar! I was able to compose a character as opposed to being very natural, so it was very interesting for me. It was great to realise that I could be this kind of real woman!

You have to imbue the characters with their own sort of feeling of justification and morality. Everyone has that, whether we see them as evil or not. So I try to bring the characters to life by making them likable or lovable, in the sense that they can be, at least to themselves.

One of the things I like about a character: I always think it's fascinating when a character can turn on a dime and go from one emotion to another. I like watching that.

I don't like the way some actors, when playing a nasty character, will try to grab hold of something good about them.

I like playing characters with as many emotions as possible. I'd love to play a really crazy person - someone truly out of her mind.

In the best works of fiction, there's no mustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy's got his reasons.

I guess I'm just good at playing repressed individuals. I'm lucky because those are often the roles that catch people's eyes.

Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.

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

The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?'

One of the things you learn as an actor is that human beings are capable of almost anything. I'm sort of in the business of illustrating that fact.

I'm not interested in a character's goodness. I'm interested in what makes them human.

I think the challenge for me in this role is going to be, is there any heart in Negan? For me, I look at that as a challenge as an actor, and that's the kind of thing that I embrace and really look forward to.

If your character is just out there acting a fool, viewers are gonna say, 'Why am I watching this?' But if he's whispering, 'I don't really want to die,' there's a level of vulnerability cemented in these bad characters.

Sometimes I'm playing somebody that I may have a problem with. Your job as an actor is not to go only play things that make you look good.

I never try and play a bad guy to be bad and to be brutal and to be nasty and vicious, because I think you're going to be very cliche there. You know, you've got to find the truth in that character and what he believes in. It just happens that, you know, he's wrong.

As an actor, it's very interesting to make the audience love you while you are doing horrendous things.

It is very easy to play a sweet girl-next-door but difficult to portray a grey character.

Broadchurch' was all about shades of grey, both in characters and storytelling, and I wanted to see that through to the end.

I think my characters are all fairly fundamentally decent, even if they have negative characteristics.

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 relish a role that really shows a bit of background into how the bad guy got the way he is... a little more complex than cackling behind a hooded cloak.

An actor's job is to find variations of the same emotion in his being so that every time he expresses grief or joy, it doesn't look the same.

It amazes me that filmmakers will still film, and audiences will still watch, relationships so bankrupt of human feeling that the characters could be reading dialogue written by a computer.