Michael Douglas Quotes

It's much harder to act in a bad film than in a good one. A terrible script makes for very difficult acting. You can win an Academy Award for some of the easiest acting in your career, made possible by a brilliant script.

Actors are always looking for actor-proof parts. A part so good you can't screw it up!

As an actor, you don't want to play a one-dimensional character.

The interesting thing about my character Sylar is that my strengths as an actor seemed to go completely against the shape of a character in the shadow.

There are actors who are really fantastically talented at being natural on screen and appearing to be themselves, but I like the challenge of becoming somebody else.

Acting in an epic and a non-fictional film is a big challenge for actors, as they need to research extensively about the characters they are playing before stepping into their shoes.

My character should not be ordinary, cliched, and if I feel that it's difficult to do this character, I take up that challenge to get into his character.

As an actor, I always feel that each and every character in my films has to be distinct. The character Thilak that I play in 'Kavan' will be one such unique role in my career.

Every character I get to play has some element of who I am, but there's no fun in playing yourself. At least, for me, there isn't.

That's where everything starts, as an actor: you've gotta have great writing and great character development, and then you have really great materials to work from.

I'm looking forward to playing some really despicable characters at some point in my career so I can branch out and stretch those acting muscles. But I wouldn't want to do that on a regular basis.

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?

I'm very fortunate that I get asked to do very different kinds of roles and I realize how much I enjoy that. I enjoy the challenge of transformation. There are actors who play one character, or a certain kind of character, the whole of their lives. I really relish the opportunity to have the challenge to totally transform.

I've tried most of my career to transform myself towards characters.

You can always find ways to make it different, as long as it's a really well-written script and well-written character.

The character is everything that I felt really strongly against - she's superficial, materialistic, vain, amoral. She's all of these things, and I realised that I really hated her. How do you play someone that you hate? But I found it really interesting and it gave me a whole new insight into what my job, or my role as an actress, could be.

Each character has their own challenges. The challenge to doing one scene is your whole history of who you are and your relationships, you only have this one shot.

What I like to do as an actor is transform. It's way more fun to play characters who are completely different than me. I like playing characters who appear one way on the outside but are actually very different from that.

Sometimes I can inhabit a feisty, vicious character. Sometimes I can inhabit a painfully shy British girl, or whatever it might be. I'm able to step into these other parts of myself. I feel like, as long as I keep doing that in my career, and I keep tapping into different parts of the human condition, that's all I ask for.

I'm not much of a Method actress, so even though my character in The Ghost Writer was quite dark and bad-tempered, I could only do that if I was seeming quite perky.

I did this movie right after it about the life of Chet Baker. It's called Born to Be Blue. In that situation, there's a real clear character you're drawing on. It's a real person. It's really exciting and interesting to do the research to figure out how to make that a nuanced, three-dimensional human being.

My entire career is contemporary based, not by choice, but just by character. So, all the movies I've done, except for one in 40 years, are contemporary. But I never did an effects movie. So, I'm also a producer and I was really curious about how this whole thing went together.

I just look for characters that have dimensions. If I don't see it written on the page, then I try to put it in there somehow. You don't want to play the same role twice.

I think if you're able to do over the course of your career 20, 30, 50 very wonderful rich characters, you'd rather have that than an Oscar.