Christina Ricci Quotes

I think it's easier for the general public to embrace me in a negative way. You have people who already have a perception of me that says I'm a bad person.

In 'Garden Party' or '40 Days and 40 Nights,' I played characters who people don't necessarily like; I just find some humanity in them.

That's what makes a character interesting from an actor's perspective - the more screwed up, the better.

Villains are fun. I think the important thing in playing them is that they don't see themselves as villains. It lets you be a little more expansive.

Virtue is not photogenic, so I liked playing bad guys. But, whenever I played a bad guy, I tried to find something good in him, and that kept my contact with the audience.

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.

If you go into something saying, 'I'm the bad guy,' you do yourself a disservice as an actor. It's always about trying to find the humanity in a character.

I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.

If you can make a character likable that's not very nice, that's the challenge of the job.

I thought that would be kind of cool, to make a bad guy look sympathetic.

I like the opportunity to play characters who have these dark sides but make the audience empathize with them. You want them to think there is some kind of sweeter, softer side to it.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

I always end up taking people that are morally ambiguous.

The villains that I play, I always think that they are grounded, wonderful people with enormous intellects who are very exciting to spend an evening with. I never see them as bad people.

What I always studied in screenwriting from my mentor John Glavin was that the most interesting characters are characters with shades of gray.

I like characters who have faults. I'm drawn to darker people.

You know, we have to take these characters - who, granted, have their separate personalities but, on a lot of levels, are pretty two-dimensional - and make them into people with flaws, with insecurities.

I'm most drawn to characters who are compelling and repellant at the same time, very often right at the same moment, and who are frightening and funny all at once.

I'm trying to make really flawed characters that have got redeeming features so people can say, 'I don't really like that character, but I can understand a bit where they've come from.'

A word, for example, that is negative, pejorative, and has caused more pain and suffering is 'illegitimate.' But every person has a mother and father. It is another way we let society hurt others.

I like the characters that have some redeeming quality or if it's interesting to me in any way.

I never try and play a bad guy to be bad and to be brutal and to be nasty and vicious, because I think you're going to be very cliche there. You know, you've got to find the truth in that character and what he believes in. It just happens that, you know, he's wrong.

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.

The beauty of Sudhir's protagonists is that they are not shown as black and white. There are various layers to the characters.

I like fractured characters with human follies.