Mike O'Malley Quotes

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.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

With any project, but especially in television, I always try to look at where the character is starting from and where he's going to end up, and try to find the biggest arc that makes it the most exciting to play.

I think everybody goes through changes, and the same should be said for fictional characters, especially ones that you follow on television.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

The Duffers like that; they like watching their characters grow.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

Film is so much to do with perfection and how differently you can feel about someone at the beginning of the film and the end of the film.

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.

There is always that thought that you might get stuck with a character. But there's always the notion that every character is always evolving.

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.

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 suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.

I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

Every actor wants to have a character that changes, that has some kind of movement, that gets from point A to point B, that doesn't just supply one note.

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

I'm trying to make all the characters change and grow, or regress.

What I discovered is I don't like to repeat lead characters because one of the most pleasurable things in a book to me is learning about the lead.

I think often times on Joss Whedon's shows he can make you hate a character for a period and then love the character. He does it effortlessly.

I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.

I remember always feeling lucky with Zoey on 'Nurse Jackie' that... she was new at the very beginning. So that gave her everywhere to go.

I care more, and I think readers do also, for characters in a state of transformation.