Helena Bonham Carter Quotes

Loki in 'Thor' is the most incredible springboard into a sort of excavation of the darker aspects of human nature. So that was thrilling, coming back knowing that I'd built the boat and now I could set sail into choppier waters.

What I really wanted to do was take this character and go beneath the veneer of Lucifer. Underneath it all, there was a guy who was a hurt soul and rejected from his father. How that played upon his choices was kind of interesting, but also it's going inside a shell of someone who doesn't know what an emotion is.

I don't know why, but I respond well to tortured characters.

Because I had a lot of emotional upheaval in my life, I'm attracted to stories about characters whose lives are full of wounds and secrets. I'm not interested in who's going to ask me to the prom. I never went to a prom.

What was so brilliant about 'Girls' was that they allowed their characters to be ludicrous and selfish and faulted but didn't shy away from a deeper psychological foundation for that neuroses.

Sylvia Plath wasn't scared of exploring the darker side of her psyche.

Exploring the dark side of my characters' personality is my forte.

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

I am always fascinated by the mental struggles that people and characters have.

There is always going to be depth and layers to people and that's what interests me in a character: when there is some problem to overcome, when there is a complication to understand in a person.

It's interesting, the acting thing. I think it must be a deep sense of insecurity that made me want to explore other characters.

'Pumped Up Kicks' is written from the perspective like Truman Capote wrote 'In Cold Blood' or Dostoevsky wrote 'Crime & Punishment.' It's psychologically breaking down someone's state of mind and diving in and walking in their shoes.

I'm more into kind of real stories, psychological movies.

The first thing I thought [when I read the script] was that Frasier was an intellectual at some points but also an Everyman - flawed and very insecure.

I think it's increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge without entering the darkness in some way.

I enjoy playing a quintessential antihero. There's something therapeutic about playing such characters. I know it sounds corny but I feel like I learn about myself when I play that characters.

I'd describe 'Born to Kill' as a 'study in psychopathy', it's very much in the heads of our main protagonist, Sam, a young boy dealing with dark, twisted psychotic desires. It's also a coming-of-age story.

I love roles where it's not about being perfect or being beautiful, where there is more of an interest in what's going on inside the character.

For me, 2016-17 was hell, and there's no way around it for me. I went through pain, depression, fear, doubt, and all of that was a journey that I was able to write through, and then I wrote when I was coming out of that dark place as well.

When you talk about people being haunted or wrestling demons, that is a rich metaphor.

I would want to do a role like the one Ezra Miller had in 'We Need To Talk About Kevin.' That is a real juicy role.

With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory—childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age—are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results.

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside.

He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been, in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away, by the fervour of this reproach.

Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.