Forest Whitaker Quotes

I was always trying, even in pure action movies, to find what was sensitive about the character more than the pure action.

At the end of the day, you have to find the humanity in you in each character.

I loved the challenge of being able to take a character who could be thrown away as 'crazy' and making her identifiable to the audience - also, to give her a vulnerability that people would cheer for.

The ideal way to approach a character is to find something in yourself that relates in some way.

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.

Villains are fun. I think the important thing in playing them is that they don't see themselves as villains. It lets you be a little more expansive.

But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.

I happen to like movies and plays about dislikeable people as long as I get to know why they are what they are.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

I don't like the idea the viewer can kind of sit there and go, 'Make me like this person.' People aren't inherently sympathetic.

No actor can play a villain if they don't sympathise with him or her - otherwise the character just becomes a two-dimensional caricature.

In my acting, I have tried to do this - to present to audiences a living creature in whom they can recognise themselves or someone they know.

Even when I'm playing a lawyer or a doctor, I want to play a person. A human being.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

You've got to understand what makes the character human.

My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my bar full of people. And that informed my life.

The bottom line always remains the same: What is the basic humanity of the character? How do I make them resonate with the reader?

When I look at a character, whether he's good or bad, one scene or 10 scenes, I just have to find my way in.

Whether it's a very dramatic part or a comical role, I feel I need to create the same thing: a full-fledged, three-dimensional character that the audience can identify with.

I'm trying to make really flawed characters that have got redeeming features so people can say, 'I don't really like that character, but I can understand a bit where they've come from.'

The real trick to these movies and making the big action sequences work - and I've forgotten this sometimes and screwed it up - the characters really have to be humanized. Because you can have the greatest special effects in the world, but if you don't care about the people in those effects, there's no impact.

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.

One of the things an actor tries to access is immediacy, so that you feel like you're experiencing it for the first time. But when you're playing a character who knows what's going to happen and can't stop himself to reacting although he knows he can't stop himself from reacting, there's a whole separate set of things to consider.

Most actors will tell you this - I don't really know how to connect, empathize with, or make worthy of any revelation a character that doesn't have love in there somewhere, that doesn't have an idealism or an empathy in there somewhere.