Dominic Monaghan Quotes

Being able to stay with a character over the course of years is a gift.

With films, you get to develop a set of characters, and then, at the end of the film, you have to throw them away.

Alison Carr on 'Homeland.' She was such great character to play, so clever and full of surprises. I was sad to see her go.

The only films that really matter to me are the ones where there are characters whose interactions are moving.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I take little bits and pieces of ideas that I may or may not believe in but I give them to this character and he runs with them. I have fun with however he handles the situation.

A whole film is just about arriving at a moment where you hopefully transfer some feeling to the audience.

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.

I like having a plot; I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.

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 like my characters to be ones I think about long after I've finished reading the script.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

My character on 'The Good Wife' is a smaller character, and his story arcs are typically season-long, unless it's a big episode for him. His transitions take place over many, many hours.

I'd never really been in a series, where you see a man at different points and perspectives in his life. Usually it's a film, where I'm playing a character who just comes in and offers something up.

Because characters are your creations, you are the one who ultimately gets to decide their fate.

You can sustain visual beauty and innovative visual ideas for a certain length of time, but in a two-hour experience, which is really what movies are, usually audiences - whether they know it or not - most want an emotional connection to character.

You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies.

I only have an awareness of what I'm trying to achieve as an actor and what my job as the character is to service.

On 'Swingtown,' I think that's when I was able to blend the character-slash-leading lady roles, and that's what I'm doing on 'Once Upon a Time' as well. She's a leading lady, but she's also this character.

I'd love to do a film. I'd love to play a character that I know the beginning, middle and end of.

If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.

I'm interested in telling the character's story, not my beliefs, political or otherwise.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.