Viola Davis Quotes

I'm always just drawn to those roles that present one way and have many other things going on underneath. It's just more fun to play as an actor.

It is difficult to portray grey characters because there is a very thin line between being nasty and slightly negative.

I enjoy playing someone who doesn't show up and say, 'This is what I am, and this is what I'm about,' but is someone who, four hours in, makes you go, 'Really? Is that what's going on?'

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

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 did a play once where a reviewer said, 'Martin Freeman's too nice to play a bad guy.' And I thought: 'Well, bad guys aren't always bad guys, you know?' When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it's false.

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.

Tone is so important because you can have a great script just be ruined with the wrong director - if they shtick it up or something. With 'Little Miss Sunshine,' I was so concerned they weren't going to play the pageant official realistically because you don't have to wink to play those kinds of characters.

I'm an enemy of exposition. I feel there's no need to overstate.

Anyone who is drawn in broad strokes either negatively or positively is generally not very interesting to play.

Even if I'm playing a bad guy, I work hard to make him multi-leveled and interesting.

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.

Some actors are better with words than me. I prefer to play it rather than say it - and keep people thinking.

I am myself sometimes, and I do state my opinions, but not in a comedy routine and not in my character. There always has to be some sort of layer to it.

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 think playing a negative character is more difficult and challenging, since you have a lot to work on, and you have to put a lot of efforts.

I didn't like characters that were one- or two-dimensional. I liked a guy to have a lot of different levels to him and layers, and I think I pretty well succeeded with Thanos.

I personally feel like certain topics and certain issues aren't really being conveyed the right way in music nowadays. It's all very direct and to the point without leaving anything to the imagination.

When you want some subtle emotions, you need some subtle vehicles for emotion.

Make subtlety obvious.

I like bringing little subtle complexities to a character. It's all about the subtext. No one can really describe or fully know another human being, even if they get a hook on them. It's more about instinctively knowing whether you like somebody or not.

I seem to have been cast several several times to do it. I think in this one, Phoenix is not purely evil. She was in the comic books at some point but the way the writers created her or we always talked about her, was that she was torn with her powers taking over and trying to control them at the same time. It was challenging to play which made it interesting for me to play this character.

You don't do characters that are the same as you, otherwise why bother to act?

Part of my aspiration as a film actor is to bring subtlety to everything I do - honesty but subtlety.

I like playing guys where it's as important what they're thinking as what they're saying. Those are the people I like playing, and the actor that I strive to be. I like actors who work in that area and I like parts that allow me to work in that area.