Eddie Redmayne Quotes

I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.

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.

I let characters be human and flawed and relatable. When we do things that aren't that great, we can understand it.

I can find some part of me that relates to even the most evil characters. At least in my imagination.

I think all of us have a hero and a villain in us.

My characters make incomprehensible decisions until you stand in their shoes. Then it makes more sense. Life is very rarely black and white, and most people are trying to do their best. I try not to judge.

You've got to understand what makes the character human.

In order to make characters real - no matter what the character is doing - you have to see yourself as capable of having done that.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

I think, to me, I was always taught you never approach any character as a villain. Every human being on earth really believes that they're doing the best thing. We all have our rationalizations.

We all have dark sides to ourselves, and I want to portray that in a realistic way.

It's important to determine not just the quality of your mind but the fullness of your heart.

Being a good actor is sort of understanding the complexity of the human psyche and also knowing that we are none of us perfect.

People treat serious subjects so seriously, which is so obvious a way of dealing with them. I'm always thinking that the best way of dealing with them is to show people as human beings.

Every single character I've ever played has a little bit of me in them just because every single human in the world has a little bit of everything in them.

I think as long as I can tell you a story about people that you understand, it doesn't matter if you don't like what they do; you understand why they did it.

You can't play a bad person; you can only be a person who does bad things for the right reasons.

Characters, like people, don't need to be right - only understood and, perhaps, accepted. We are all grey, lighter and darker, depending on our state of security.

It's so funny, you go to acting school thinking you're going to learn how to be other people, but really it taught me how to be myself. Because it's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

I don't believe in villains - just people who channel their energy in the wrong way.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

The ideal way to approach a character is to find something in yourself that relates in some way.

I try to take people one at a time, with all the contradictions and compromises that most of us live with.

I don't believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don't want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as in life, most people are a mixture.

Evil is such a simplistic way to describe any character, be it Iago or Caliban, or any character from history.