Paul Dano Quotes

With any character, I try to focus more on who the character is and how they got to be who they are.

I do build my own backstory as an actor. It's important to know where your characters have come from in order to know where they're going - in order to exist in that state of being.

If you know your characters well enough, you aren't trying to grasp for storylines. You're really thinking about their flaws and their passions and what they're chasing.

I like to take a character and develop it.

You don't want to make performances; you want to make people. When a project knows, 'Okay, my bad guys need to be a little sympathetic, and my good guys need to have a bit of a mean streak,' you're off to a good start.

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

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

When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.

As an actor, you can have your own backstory and prepare all the details that you need to know for your character.

Like anything, you've gotta find the humanity in the characters.

Usually when you're playing a character, you think a lot about their backstory.

I like characters where there's something going on and something to make him real. If you find out what somebody cares about, all of a sudden, the whole world opens up.

If you're dealing with a character that actually exists, there's an awful lot of information there. So, you can put together, from the information, motivations, insecurities, reactions. Where does that seed get born, if you like?... What I do is put that together.

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

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.

I am attracted to the complexities and deeper truths of characters, and I can't name a favourite role any more than I can name a favourite food!

I live intimately with my characters before starting a book. I cut out pictures of them for my wall. I do time lines for each major character and a time line for the entire novel: What is going on in the world as my characters struggle with their problems?

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

To play any character, you have to have a total understanding of why they do what they do.

I usually start with a repulsive character and go on from there.

For every book that I write... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life.

I've always been interested in character-driven pieces, and my approach to directing is through acting.

When my lady and I sit down and watch TV, I find she gets annoyed at characters because they don't do what she would do in the situation. I'm always like, 'Well, she has to do that because that's what the story is.'

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.