Tracy Letts Quotes

Every actor has to love and loathe the character he plays.

As an actor, you don't want to know the beginning and end to your character's arc. It makes it more fun. You're not playing the end. You're playing it realistically. You don't know where this character is going to go and what's going to happen to him, which just makes it more interesting for the viewers to watch.

As an actor, my job is not to always play characters who make everybody happy. That's not interesting.

From a writer's standpoint, each character and story presents its own unique challenges and delights. I'm deeply curious about all of my characters, and I love peeling away their layers to see what's underneath their skin, or secreted deep within their hearts.

I've been on the show for six years and I don't even know what her history is. I sort of make things up in my mind, but I think it's hard for an audience to follow and invest in a character when they don't have the details.

I always like to play roles where I either love the character or think that it's a story that I can tell better than anyone else. There are always reasons for me to do whatever I do.

Also, in my acting, I feel very much like a storyteller, exploring the flaws of the characters that I interpret. I look for the imperfections, and I love a character that is just so flawed.

'Agent Mom' is a perfect opportunity for me to do what I love... develop characters, act and take incredible stories to my fans. So yes, I can absolutely see myself cast as 'Agent Mom.'

I love series television because it's so much fun to have that much opportunity to paint the character.

I think often times on Joss Whedon's shows he can make you hate a character for a period and then love the character. He does it effortlessly.

But I'm attracted to roles where I get to really go in and explore a character.

As an actor, that's the best thing you can do, really take people along on a story and tell them something.

I am good when there is something central about the character. There is always a human theme I attach myself to. I am really looking for something that is moving or enlightening or something with depth as an actor. I look for these kinds of roles.

For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.

I love playing really strung out characters, and characters that are really pushed to their limits and losing their mind. I think that's wonderful. To be able to lose it, in many ways, is just great fun to do.

With 'Girls,' Marnie was a slow burn; she shifted over time. With 'Get Out,' I was suddenly faced with the pressure that, like, I need an audience to know Rose deeply within 15 minutes, within a couple scenes. And that's not something I've ever done before.

When it's a bigger character, and there's a lot going on for her, and there are all these different elements that go into the character, I just love being able to dive into it.

I don't think the challenge is asking an audience to like a character; it's inviting them to try and understand them... then making that journey entertaining and worth their while. It's a classic trick, but it's human, and it allows characters to have more depth.

The way that I work as an actress, I always prefer to read the whole story and tell the whole story and feel what the whole story's going to be, the journey for the audience and how it ebbs and flows, the highs and the lows.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

In a series, you really need to stay open-minded. It's not like a play or a film, where you can create and fully commit to your character's back-story.

As an actor, I'm constantly striving to find the darkness in the lighter characters and the lightness in the darker characters.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.