Alexander Skarsgard Quotes

A film has a beginning, middle, and an end. There is a certain amount of time that you have to embody these people. You know the entire story arch. But on TV, you have to let your guard down. You don't know how long the show is going to last. There is this excitement that comes with developing a character long-term.

I think that there's something really special about doing a series. You get inside the skin of that character 'cause it's such a long time.

I love doing a television show. It just always feels like it's a little while before you find something that feels unique and that feels like a character that you really want to play for awhile.

Working in television it's really great to be able to stick with a character for a long period of time. It's not like you have one shot, and that's it. You have more time, more room, an ability to reflect on your performance and the character and how much has really been shown, and what you'd like to see. It's nice. You have more breathing room.

TV is longer form, and that's sometimes a positive, and sometimes a more challenging thing. As an actor, you want to be able to have your character develop or transform in some way. When you're acting on a show over the course of multiple seasons, you get to watch a character really grow and change, and go from one place to an entirely other place.

It's going to sound like the easy answer, but I love them both. I do! I really don't prefer one over the other. With movies, you really dive into a character for two to three months, but then it's gone. With a TV series, you have a constant location you're living in, and you're always working on the same character along with people who are like your own family. I'm lucky to have done both.

With movies, it's 10 or 12 or sometimes even 24 weeks, if it's a massive movie, to live within a character. But with a show that's successful, if you start in the first or second season and go until the end, you're always finding new elements of your character that are being added in because you start to live in them as human beings.

Actually, my favourite roles have been in theatre, but on TV, my faves were Slap Maxwell and Larry Sanders.

Sometimes shows get into their 5th and 6th season and you're like, where can you go? But 'Dexter' is still so strong, it's really refreshing.

I think a lot of drama, nowadays, is character-based and development-based, but 'True Blood' is very plot-oriented.

With film, there's a consistency to it, but what I like about the TV shows that I've been fortunate to do, like 'Friday Night Lights' and 'True Blood,' is that it feels like you're doing a film.

Anytime you're lucky enough to be on something that lasts longer than half a season, you never quite know what kind of life the show is gonna take on.

I did 'The Commish' and an episode of 'Neon Rider,' and then I got the series called 'Street Justice,' which I ended up doing about 18 episodes of.

I'm obsessed with 'The Americans.' It's one of my favorite shows. I also love 'Baskets' - low-brow, high-art comedy.

You never know, especially on episodic television, you just don't know week to week what's going to happen.

I didn't watch much television growing up, and before I did 'Boston Legal,' I had no understanding of what it was like for a viewer to look forward to finding out what was going to happen the next week.

When I went in for 'The Good Doctor,' I had just been released from 'Berlin Station.' And when I got the initial role for the 'Good Doctor' pilot, her name was Allegra Abe. That was the script.

There is no point in appearing in just a few episodes. If I do a show on television, it won't be for a few episodes only.

Kai was my longest arc that I had done on a show, so it was a big step forward to me.

After 'Star Trek,' I was the commander on 'Stargate Atlantis,' the final season, and once my character had become a good commander, I was sorry that the show didn't last beyond that.

Television is very different than working on film. With films, you get to develop a set of characters, and then, at the end of the film, you have to throw them away.

We all know people for that length of time and people change. They mature. There is a certain expectation that a fictional character does not change. But you can't go back and play him the same way.

Typically with HBO shows, the ninth episode often winds up being a big one and when lots of exciting stuff happens. And then the tenth one is the more placid, character-based one.

I'd like to think that I don't have a stock character that I go to. I'm lucky in that when you get to initiate your own scene, you get to play whoever you want. That's really kind of cool, but all my characters are short. I look on the videotape, and I thought they were taller, but they're all 5'2".

I feel like a lot of the films I do, part of the reason I like doing them is I'm not 100 percent sure what it's going to be. It's exciting. I read an equal amount of very generic scripts, and you kind of know exactly what those are and that doesn't whet my appetite. I already know what it is or I already know what the character is. It's just a lot harder to get interested.