Kaitlin Olson Quotes

I continue to be known as a guy that plays really complex, three-dimensional characters.

Quiet people, people who aren't given to emotional outbursts, people who are economic with words - they're also fun to play, but you find yourself needing a laser precision in those roles. Otherwise you just sort of stand around, looking slightly brain-dead. You worry about being uninteresting.

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

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

The chance to play a character with a split personality is an actor's dream.

I don't like the way some actors, when playing a nasty character, will try to grab hold of something good about them.

I like playing characters with as many emotions as possible. I'd love to play a really crazy person - someone truly out of her mind.

I've never really played everyday people. I've played realist roles, but not mere daily life. There was always something incredible happening to my characters.

I do not choose characters because I think, 'Wow, that woman is so strong.' I chose these characters with utmost conviction because I think they were realistic enough to exist, and I really liked the scripts.

The nuances and organic characteristics of a character become second nature if I'm doing my job well.

When you work on anything, you want to find the range of impulses - which ones get portrayed is another question, but you want to have that complexity and that fullness, even if you're playing a cartoon character.

It's easier to play aggression and malevolence onscreen, often, than to hit softer notes.

I feel like my responsibility as an actor is to make characters as compelling and believable as possible.

Basically, I only play one character; I just play him at different volumes.

I believe strongly that characters are five-dimensional, and they're complicated, and life is complicated, and people are complicated.

I don't approach a role by saying I'll be unsavory or unlikable.

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.

I definitely wouldn't shy away from doing another action based project, but I feel like my forte is more like playing real, ordinary people. I'm a girl's girl.

I'll always find the things that make a role complicated!

Representation means having characters with layers, showing them as human beings, so we can relate or have mixed emotions for that character.

I can usually play polarizing characters.

I knew what kind of actor I was going to be, and I looked for inspiration to people like Alec Guinness, Cyril Cusack, Timothy Spall and Jim Broadbent. I looked at them and thought, 'They play human beings as they really are.'

That straight man character is a short trip between comedy and drama in a project, so I can play the comedic beat on the same page as a dramatic beat. It gives me a lot of freedom as an actor to play scenes in multiple ways because I don't play the clown, nor do I play someone who is particularly maudlin.

You never want to just be outrageous for outrageous' sake 'cause then it doesn't work, and it's not believable. You want to be as true to whatever character you're playing.

'Obvious Child,' the short, had a nice life online and a great festival run, but the short and the feature still stand apart from everything else I've done. I play a woman who you might meet in life. My other work is much more heightened.