Tessa Thompson Quotes

Female characters in literature are full. They're messy: they've got runny noses and burp and belch. Unfortunately, in film, female characters don't often have that kind of richness.

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.

We're all complex human beings, and if some of that complexity shows through, I think it's advantageous for the movie.

I'm so sick of hearing how there's no strong roles for women. I don't care about strong roles. I just want to see women who are characters! A nun, a serial killer, a housewife, as long as there's some depth there.

I love the powerful woman who's complicated. There's no push to be one thing or another thing. It's all human. That's what you look for as an actor: characters written and portrayed in the most human way possible.

I believe strongly that characters are five-dimensional, and they're complicated, and life is complicated, and people are complicated.

I like playing interesting, complicated women.

I am a cisgender woman who has always had a lot of female friends. While many of us have traits in common, none of us will ever be exactly the same. So it's enormously important to me that my female characters be people, and be allowed to be whatever they need to be.

With any project I work on - not just 'True Detective' - I don't feel the need just to play a strong woman. I don't want the audience to say, 'Oh, she was so strong.' I want to play characters that are flawed and interesting.

I'm just interested in all of the different ways that a woman can be. We don't have enough, when it comes to American film, that shows all of the different complexities and ways that a woman is interesting and mysterious and dynamic and really complicated.

It's great to have female characters that have depth that you can explore instead of being the decoration or the girlfriend or the wife.

If you're going to play human beings, and you're going to play them three-dimensionally, you have to show every side of them.

The shows which have strong female characters are long overdue. I think there should be more and I am glad to see that there are more. There are fantastic female and diverse actors all around the world. I am glad to see that they are getting more recognition and being pushed into light more and more.

I love roles where it's not about being perfect or being beautiful, where there is more of an interest in what's going on inside the character.

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.

I like to play characters that are convincing, that aren't just straightforward and nice.

There's no need for a female character that does things like a male character; that's not what makes interesting female characters in my view.

I've always tried to be conscious of how I represent women in my work. They don't have to be good or strong women, but they have to be complex.

I'm interested in playing lots of different complex women.

I totally respond to complex characters, and I'm not interested in anything too simple.

I think women have such rich emotional lives that they are expressive about. I also think they're funny. I like watching strong female characters, and I like writing them. I don't know if it's conscious that I gravitate towards women, but it's certainly evolved that way.

As a writer, as much as I try, I can't stop writing female characters. They have so much more to offer; they have to wear so many different hats. There's so much wonderful gray matter in a female's life that it just makes for a stronger character.

I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.

I think there are more female characters in videogames now but I also think that's because videogames in general are more diverse now.

Women just make interesting characters, especially when you're working against cliches.