Joseph Morgan Quotes

It's interesting sometimes when an audience can empathize with a villain.

I like movies that make you semi fall in love with the villain so you have sympathy for him.

I love playing bad. But my whole thing is usually villains that don't know that they're evil.

I haven't spent my entire career playing the guy in the bad hat, although I have to say that the bad guy is frequently much more interesting than the good guy.

When a character does something appalling but you still want to root for them, I find that the most exciting challenge to play, if you can pull it off. You're not supposed to like it, but you can't help it.

I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do.

It's the challenge of trying to evoke any kind of sympathy for a role that ordinarily we would say, "Oh, this is a bad guy" and dismiss him.

I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.

I don't play the role of a villain, really, but I like playing anti-hero kind of roles. I like characters where there's conflict, drama, and more personal investment than just being heroes.

Where typically the cops are generally the good guys, 'The Red Road' blurs the lines intelligently and shows corruption from all sides of the law. It provides unpredictable drama where the audience is kept guessing about how these characters will each choose to act.

If the reader cares, I don't think it matters so much whether your hero is in fact an anti-hero.

Audiences grew to like this duality of feeling, where you're both championing a character and you're revolted by them.

I work very hard at creating complex characters, a mix of positives and negatives. They are all flawed. I believe flaws are almost universal, and they help us understand, sympathise and, paradoxically, feel closer to such characters.

No actor can play a villain if they don't sympathise with him or her - otherwise the character just becomes a two-dimensional caricature.

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.

Every actor will tell you it's so much more fun to play the bad guy because usually those characters are more complex and more broad and more interesting, and have more sides to them.

Look, we're in the time of the anti-hero.

Do we root for Michael Corleone in the 'Godfather' films? I think so, even if he is a monster.

That's sort of what I like about this character is that he's not the good guy, he's not truly the bad guy.

It's fun to play a character who lives on the edge, who is an ethical and moral mess, and is paying the price for some of his actions.

I have been thinking a lot about what we see in villains, how we relate to villains, and what it is about certain villains that we actually empathize with. Like Macbeth. We're not supposed to like a guy who kills the king and takes over, but there's something about him we're really fascinated by.

I think a villain who starts his morning looking in the mirror, wringing his hands, and going, 'How can I be evil today?' is not an interesting villain. An interesting villain is a person who you understand on some level, I think.

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.'

I think a lot of actors will tell you that playing a villain can be more fun than playing the straight and narrow good guy.

When you play an anti-hero, it is a task to make people empathise with your character.