David Zayas Quotes

And I have the support of the writers: I have a great relationship with the creative team, and they have a good hold of my character and my personality, and they come up with some great stuff, and I'm forever trying to change it up, keep it fresh.

So much of what I do... is coming up with new characters and trying to invent voices for them, and to have people fully fleshed out in my head and to know who can say what in the scene and who these characters are... I love it.

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

It's always incredible though when you feel like the writer knows the character intimately and can see their life sprawling away outside of the show.

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.

I love it when characters surprise you, just like real people. When I write a scene I just try to make the characters behave in a way that feels natural to them. Sometimes that means they make a left turn and do something unexpected. Those are always the best scenes in my opinion.

I never really thought about what characters I play. I always just wanted different characters.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

I feel I should never do passive characters. They don't work for me.

There's no particular role that comes to mind that I'd like to take on, but for me, it's about playing interesting characters and not just two-dimensional ones.

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

When you have a book as material as it is, it's a lot easier to create a character because you have so many resources to draw upon when acting.

If you give a character room to breathe, they come alive.

I spend a lot of time with my characters.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

I think sometimes actors are drawn to good television because you have more time to sell it, you have more time to shape a character, and to tell a story, and that's really appealing.

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

One of the things that I've been trying to do with my characters, one of the things that does lead to me turning things down, is I don't really want to repeat myself.

I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.

I really fall in love with my characters, even the bad ones. I love getting together with them. They tell me what to do; they take me on a wild and wonderful trip.

I always find that really interesting, you know, when I get to see characters that I love in TV and film and theater around their family.

You try, as an actor, to wear a mask; you're serving a story.

You can't sit here and try to predict what kind of character I'm going to be drawn to next. At the time when I read 'The Girl on the Train,' it wasn't like I was, 'Ooh, I want to play a hot mess next.'

I've always felt, even with sketches, that if you don't care about these people, then it doesn't matter.

To me, the struggle is to try to make a less-well-written or less-well-rounded character and find who they are. If you really get it, and it's all on the page, then it's really just gonna pop out at you.