Pablo Schreiber Quotes

You don't play villains like they are villains. You play them like you know exactly where they are coming from. Which hopefully you do.

To play any character, you have to have a total understanding of why they do what they do.

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.

I do think you need to understand a character's motivation and perspective.

For each character, I try to understand what is driving them.

I think you approach a part the same way and just find out in what's making them tick and who they are. In a movie like this you may have a little less time and few dialogue scenes and exposition scenes for your character to really get that across, and so I wanted to be able to convey that she's not somebody who's just punching a clock but she has this weird emotional investment in her job to where she does get quite myopic and that's what makes her relentless.

If you're dealing with a character that actually exists, there's an awful lot of information there. So, you can put together, from the information, motivations, insecurities, reactions. Where does that seed get born, if you like?... What I do is put that together.

I try to give both my heroes and villains an emotional dimensionality which provides the motivation for their actions.

I never play a villain that I don't have something I can either do or say so the audience sees there is something redeemable about them. In other words, I don't want to do evil for evil's sake. I don't want to do Jason slasher movies. There's no point in that.

You can't think that you're playing a villain, or you'll end up with a cartoon. You have to think about him as a person and a hero.

Every time you play a bad girl or guy in a movie, you really come from a place of pain.

I find the trick to playing a villain is that you can't be bad for the sake of being bad. It has to be rooted in some sort of heartbreak.

My thing is, I like playing guys who have a really interesting internal monologue.

I look for characters who are emotionally driven.

Bond doesn't have an inner life. There would be moments when I'd think, 'We need to gather our thoughts here and have a breather,' where in another novel you'd slow the pace, have some description and see what Bond feels about this. But Bond doesn't reflect. All you can do is move on to the next bomb or shark or car.

I know myself - I cannot just play a cliche. It has to be a character; it has to be written with the complexity of the human being behind. Could be bad, could be good, could be someone we would hate, but still, I need a reason for that influence, and I need to understand why.

I don't think I can play a role without falling in love with something about her; even the most despicable people who I have portrayed had some aspect of them which I found beautiful.

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

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

If you go into something saying, 'I'm the bad guy,' you do yourself a disservice as an actor. It's always about trying to find the humanity in a character.

Know what your characters want, know what they need most, know what they fear most, and don't be fearful of facing it, no matter how unpleasant it may be.

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

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

I don't have any special approach for playing dark characters. That's because I never looked at them as dark characters per se. For me, they were real people.

There's always that key to every character that lets you go to those places you need to go to. No matter how much you might hate the character, it makes you understand it.