Martin Henderson Quotes

I'm not the kind of actor that would know what my character had for breakfast last Tuesday.

I am a professional actor, and I don't go about moralizing about what the character does. Otherwise, seriously, why be an actor? You're not making some kind of social statement. That's not what actors do.

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

Well, first of all, you read the script a million times. Because what the script gives you are given circumstances. Given circumstances are all the facts of your character.

I love those preliminary conversations about who a character is. You try on wigs, shoes and clothes. It's preferable when it's not about looking pretty. It can get a little dull to just be cute. We talk about things like, maybe my character can't afford these Christian Louboutins.

Oftentimes, in fact I think this is to my fault, I look at usually scripts as a whole. I should probably pay more attention to the character that I'm going to play and what they do.

I have always been attracted to good scripts and try hard to make characters as believable as possible. That means trying to figure out how they would react to situations, what they eat, think, and feel.

You start out with scripts pre-written, with no specific actor in mind, so you've got to build a character on top of that foundation. It's not just lifting words off the page, it's constructing a history around them as well.

I mean, can I really create a full, three-dimensional character? I don't know anymore. I'm certainly going to try.

The thing with videogame characters is that they tend to be really undercooked, and people don't take the time to really flesh them out. They don't treat them with the respect that a writer writing characters in any other medium would treat their character.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

When you start out on a project as an actor, you know, you approach the character from the standpoint of maybe writing a list - even if it's a mental list that you make - of the adjectives that the character has or that character possesses.

What makes characters real are details, and if you're crafting a person from scratch, you're probably not going to pay as much attention to a question like, 'Does this person bite their nails?'

For movies, I usually do an entire book that has all kinds of things about what is happening at the time the movie is going on and try to get into what my character's going to be like, to try to get some consistency, because they shoot movies out of order.

Once you've established where you are, you go to the character and elaborate on expressions and action.

I feel like there are things I can relate to in every character. But I feel like when you read a script, you don't get to see the definition behind someone, you just get to read what the person goes through and find a place to come from to make it real.

Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.

I know all actors are different, but I've never sat down and asked the writers, 'Where are we headed? Am I good or bad?'

You try to get to know your character as best as you can before you start filming - what's written and not written.

What I mostly do is take the script, analyse the hell out of it, see what's in there, see what kind of person I'm dealing with, and then forget I'm playing a father and just play a person who exemplifies all those things.

I'm a character and relationship guy, and even with the 'Saw' films, it's special-effects people's jobs to create these scary things. It's not my job. My job is to bring some sense of humanity to the character, no matter how evil he may be. The script is going to take me there.

When I shoot, I try to feel the body and the face and the weight of the actor, because the character until that moment is only in the pages of the script. And very often, I pull from the life of my actors. I'm always curious about what these characters and these actors are hiding about their lives.

When you're writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children's books.

In the work that I normally do, you have a whole script, a whole arc, that you play. And I do believe a good actor will play every bit of information they're given.

When I approach any script, I always try to find what I would relate to most in it.