Ray Liotta Quotes

I'm attracted to playing characters that have flaws.

I think any character has to be well-rounded, whether they are male or female - they have to be complex and make choices that maybe we don't agree with, you know? I guess that's what makes them human.

I try genuinely, when I'm playing a character, to not judge them and just to inhabit someone as how one sees them. That being said, you also want to make sure that you don't blur the edges of people too much because humans are naughty and complicated beings.

My wheelhouse is intense characters who have a certain sympathetic streak and also a sense of humor.

For me, I start at the place that my characters are human. I start at the place that they are onions that are layered and meant to be peeled, just as we as human beings are.

However, for my characters to have depth, they have to be human and complex, have both qualities and flaws, do the right things at times, and at others, things they'll regret having done and not necessarily know how to undo.

I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realize how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in the same human heart.

The endings for all my characters seem sufficiently human and messy for me to feel comfortable with them. In some ways they have only moved an inch, but sometimes an inch is a great distance.

'Funny People' is my favorite performance of myself to date. Even though it's a comedy and there are serious moments, I really felt like Leo felt like a real person. It didn't feel like I was playing myself. Whether it's a comedy or drama, I just try to make it as realistic as possible.

I love to start characters in a place where you think you know them. We can make all kinds of assumptions about them and think they have no redeeming qualities, but like everyone, they're complex.

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

We're all complex human beings, and if some of that complexity shows through, I think it's advantageous for the movie.

Character and emotionality don't always have to be relegated to quieter, more simple constructs.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.

I think I am more attracted to characters with a subtext, whatever that is and they don't necessarily have to be virtuous, but they have to at least be human.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

You know, I think a lot of times what happens when we as actors know we're playing a bad guy is we get into bad guy mode. You know what, man? In real life, bad people do good things too and good people do bad things. So you don't necessarily have to be the stereotypical bad guy to still do bad things.

I just like playing interesting, complex, complicated characters. I like films that also have an element of humor.

With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.

If you're going to play human beings, and you're going to play them three-dimensionally, you have to show every side of them.

I love Nicole Holofcener's films for their constant duality of humor and emotion and their focus on very real, if flawed, dynamics between funny people.

The truth is that, to me, a likeable character is a character that is really flawed, so I don't know what people mean when they say 'likable.'

I always respond to characters who have depth. I'm always interested in those people. They're the ones who surprise you.

I think there are a lot of really funny things in 'The Descendants,' but there're a lot of different tones in that movie, in the same way that 'Transparent' has a lot of different tones.