Geoffrey Rush Quotes

The leading character isn't always the most important or interesting character; when people think that the protagonist is the character portrayed, it's people who haven't read Shakespeare.

King Lear alone among these plays has a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure.

If I am not playing the villain then I'll play the friend, or the brother who dies in the third reel.

If I've got one thing that I really believe about fiction and life, it's that there are no minor characters.

I've never been interested in playing the boring ingenue.

I think, the first time I played Iago at the Public Theater, I realized I had a - much to my chagrin - I realized I had an instinct for these conflicted characters, for these torn characters, for these characters who could be described as evil. I wouldn't describe them that way.

It took a while to decide I wanted to do Hamlet. It wasn't that I was daunted - I'd been acting professionally since my mid-20s and had some pretty big Shakespearean roles under my belt by that stage, at 32: Petruchio in 'The Taming of the Shrew,' Edgar in 'King Lear,' Antony, Richard III. But when it came to Hamlet, I hesitated.

Usually, you just have a hero and a villain - in any movie, not just a superhero movie.

I grew up doing regional Shakespeare, and when Hamlet sees the ghost of his father, there's something about that that you don't really do in film anymore.

I have played bad-guy roles, but they were significant to the story.

Tragedy is a great storytelling form. It worked extremely well for Shakespeare. It worked extremely well for Jim Cameron with 'Titanic.'

I just want to be a part of great stories, whether I'm part of an amazing ensemble cast or I'm leading it or the antagonist or whatever.

Actors like to play bad guys because they're more fun. They also win more awards.

I would love to play Henry IV, Henry V, and Hamlet.

We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

I think on 'Third Watch' that I was the comic relief on a lot of that. I mean, I definitely had dark moments, but people tended to think he was funny even if the character himself wasn't having a fun time.

I've always wanted to play the villain. But the young girl is never the villain.

When you're playing King Lear, you have to have a little humour, or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.

I love the idea of stories being about great beginnings and terrible endings.

A lot of people have always asked, is Penn Cage me? And I say no. There's an early character in an earlier novel, 'Mortal Fear,' that's closer to me.

For the most part, romance is written in third person, and it's written in multiple points of view, so you're in the hero's head, and you're in the heroine's head. I've always said that I'm more of a narrator than a creator.

With TV season structures - and I'm a huge TV watcher - you look at shows like 'Breaking Bad,' which is my favorite show of all time, and 'The Sopranos,' which is pretty high up there as well, and there was that thing where, every season, Walter White would go up a level, but there would be a new bad.

I'm usually the bad guy, you know, but I do a lot of different genres of acting.

You have to have somebody to root for. I truly believe that's how you ground a movie. You ground them in the characters.

I don't think there are any negative roles anymore. I think we can aptly put such characters under 'anti-hero' tag.