Denis Leary Quotes

I think there's an essential problem in movies and TV that I think a lot of people experience now: Audiences are way more interested in the actors than the characters that they're playing. It's a strange thing.

Characters don't belong to anyone, not even the person who plays them.

It's all about story and character with me, and I don't care if the job is on daytime or prime time or the web. Hey, give me a good character and someone to listen, and I'll do my acting on a street corner.

As a writer, all you want to do is write for great actors. That's all.

Theater is about language, so characters have to define themselves through language for an audience.

I'm just a hired actor who was hired for a particular job, but I think one of the joys of reading the script was the way that the personal and the global are woven together.

I've played a lot of cops and a lot of bad guys, so I would like to play a regular person and just live a regular life with something interesting about it. I love the idea of television and kind of infiltrating that.

One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors, and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate.

But what I did think would be interesting is if we created a fictitious story of our own, and then took these stories that we had collected and assigned them to characters who would be played by actors.

Acting is contained - you act for three months, then leave it - but writing is the act of creation. Writing is dangerous.

I believe that as a writer and a director, you're only providing the skeleton of a character, and you're hiring actors to fill it out.

'A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints' was the first real actor-actor part I did, and I hope to do more. Action movies are fun, but I'd be happy not to do them if there are better roles.

I think from an actor's point of view, you always want something to play that's dramatic or something that feels like it could be very bold in choice. And of course, the boldest possible choice you could play at the end of a character's life is death.

I think being an actor makes me a better writer and vice versa. I know the kinds of roles I would kill to play, and I try to create them for others.

I think sometimes actors are drawn to good television because you have more time to sell it, you have more time to shape a character, and to tell a story, and that's really appealing.

There is no better place to plot the death of a character than when you're miserable and working out.

If it's time for your character to go, it's time for your character to go - you know what I mean? That's it. It doesn't matter who you are.

With a play, there's more of a definable arc because of the nature of theater: You know, there's no editing, so there's something more natural about the arc a character follows in a play. I think theater is more an actor's medium, whereas film is more a director's medium, because that's who controls the final feel of the film.

To get a script like 'Death Proof' and to get cast in it just affirmed that I want to do character work; that's where my heart is. Maybe I will get to it again, maybe I won't, but it's what I like to do is play something a little outside of myself. This solidified the desire certainly for me.

I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before.

I learned a lot from Dick Wolf. I'll always remember playing that character because it was such a good character. It was great to be able to be a character like that for television. I think the thing that I'll bring from the whole experience, the whole 10 years, is I had never been interested in the television business before.

Our dream as actors is to tell interesting stories about interesting people.

From the moment we started working on the first 'Wreck-It Ralph,' we knew there were so many possibilities with these characters.

No, I am not looking at being a part of television in India, but I may consider movies, if I get to play a strong character.

I know 'Dabangg' has some pre-requisites. Every film has some requisites that you have to fulfill. I sat down with my writer and discussed what as an audience I want to see in the second part of the film. We worked towards that and we hope what we thought connects with the audience.