Isaiah Washington Quotes

I love to start characters in a place where you think you know them. We can make all kinds of assumptions about them and think they have no redeeming qualities, but like everyone, they're complex.

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.

I always tell my students to complicate your characters: never make it easy for the reader. Nobody is ever one thing. That's what makes characters compelling.

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.

I never play a villain that I don't have something I can either do or say so the audience sees there is something redeemable about them. In other words, I don't want to do evil for evil's sake. I don't want to do Jason slasher movies. There's no point in that.

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.

Sometimes, the smaller roles in movies can be the most interesting. If you only take the stance that you'll only play central characters in movies, you'll find yourself not being able to indulge in that morally grey terrain that makes support characters so rich and interesting.

It's all about exploring the more unpredictable aspects in the character, not just fighting people.

The more secrets and twists in a character, the better.

It's very easy to approach a character like that - a so-called strong woman who overcomes the odds - and give a one-note performance, playing that strength alone. Strength is only one thing a person has.

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.

You can't play a guy who's just a snake, because what do you draw on?

If you go into something saying, 'I'm the bad guy,' you do yourself a disservice as an actor. It's always about trying to find the humanity in a character.

You're only reduced to a cliche if you don't humanize a character.

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 like to play non-cardboard characters. I try and bring out the many complex layers in the personality of the characters I play.

To ground a character in reality, you have to use shades of gray.

I am not interested in one-sided characters.

I want to give my characters nuance.

As an actor, I'm constantly striving to find the darkness in the lighter characters and the lightness in the darker characters.

I think difficult characters are very rewarding to do. They often have facets to them and this and that.

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.

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.

All the characters I've ever played have really had nothing to do with looks. There's a lot of things that are a lot more interesting to me to play than that.

I'm attracted to playing people who aren't necessarily straightforward.