Mads Mikkelsen Quotes

I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to heroes who do bad things and to villains who think they're the good guys, but I do find that moral ambiguity and conflict makes for great characters.

We all are who we are. We're not necessarily good, and we're not necessarily bad. So much television, in the writing, is so one-dimensional, in that aspect, where you have your good guys and you have your bad guys.

I tend to look for the good in bad people and the bad in good people, to make them human. 'Cause I don't think that people generally are that black and white. Maybe in movie-land they can be... but that isn't necessarily all there is.

In general, I think writing characters, no one is 100 percent good or bad, and certainly, the bad characters never think they're bad themselves. Even the worst characters don't feel like they're bad guys on the inside.

The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fiction's attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest.

We were living in a tumultuous time, when the world was upside down. Freeman produced a show that was black and white, the good guys versus the bad guys.

The greatest bad guys, you understand where they're coming from. They believe they're doing the right thing. Sometimes it's for greed, sometimes it's for other reasons, but they are what they call the center of good. They always believe they're doing the right thing.

The older I get the more I realize there's no real good guys or real bad guys, and I'm curious about how the good guys got good and how the bad guys got bad.

You know, the best-laid plans of mice and men... I like playing bad guys, and I don't have a problem doing that. They're interesting characters, and there's as many different kinds of bad guys as there are good guys - they're rich, they're strong, they're powerful, and so that's fine with me.

We seem, as a culture, to start to adhere to these antiheroes and have grown tired of the traditional, straight-up-and-down good guy.

The beauty of the characters on 'Justified' is that all the human beings that are written are all flawed. Even with the good guys, you see darkness surface.

What makes 'The Wire' a beautiful story is how true to life it is. In other shows, you have a good guy and a bad guy. In 'The Wire,' bad guys are trying to be good, good guys are doing bad. You have real life. The people who do bad get bad things done to them.

A lot of the best villains are the ones that think they are right. That think they are the good guy.

It seems to me that most characters, in anything, are flawed in some way, just like most people. You look for the good in the flawed people and vice versa, and then try and make them appealing in some way.

We always want to find good and bad guys, and I don't believe in that.

I much prefer playing the bad guys. I think they are always the most interesting characters. I liken it to painting: if you're playing the good guy, you get three colors: red, white and blue. But if you're the bad guy, you get the whole palette.

I always look at films as real stories with real people in real situations. That's why I struggle with the whole notion of calling someone the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy', because I think we all have potential to do good things and all have the potential to do bad things.

I don't have examples in my life of people who are all good or bad; I have deeply loved many people who are both, and I relate to those kinds of people on a far greater level.

I don't think anybody's all good or all bad.

If I play a villain, I try to find his lightness and his good side. And if I play a hero or a good guy, I'll try to find his darkness or his flaws. Because I don't believe in good and evil. I believe in grays.

Heroes aren't supposed to do bad things. That's what villains are for. So either the good supersedes the bad, or the bad makes it impossible to remember the good. We don't like it when such duality exists in one person. We don't want to know our heroes are human.

As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.

Virtue is not photogenic, so I liked playing bad guys. But, whenever I played a bad guy, I tried to find something good in him, and that kept my contact with the audience.

There's no good guys and bad guys.

The way I look at humanity, I don't think there's good guys or bad guys. We're all potentially bad and potentially good.