Susan Kelechi Watson Quotes

As a viewer, I care about people, I care about characters, I care about perspective.

In my acting, I have tried to do this - to present to audiences a living creature in whom they can recognise themselves or someone they know.

You can't make the audience fall in love with a character you don't like.

The most I could hope for is to come and try and develop a character who is interesting, who is interesting to me, who is interesting to fans and who could contribute to the storytelling that is 'Law & Order: SVU.'

The audience has to understand that if the film is going to have any meaning for them. If they are going to empathize with the characters, they have to visualize the process of concentration involved in making every move.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

I'm sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.

As an actor, that's the best thing you can do, really take people along on a story and tell them something.

In the process of developing a character, you do, in fact, start to take him on as a personality.

When you can have a character that the audience likes from the beginning, but then you put them in a situation where they grow - I think that gives it a lot of heart.

My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my bar full of people. And that informed my life.

As an actor, what you dream of is being able to portray people that people empathize with and understand and really feel for.

Acted drama requires surrender of one's self, sympathetic absorption in the play as it develops.

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

As an actor, you don't really have a say or a voice in what the conversation of the show is going to be. So, as an actor, I'm just trying to make sense of why the character is making these choices, and somehow, in that way, you can sympathize or root, at least not detest, what this person is doing. That's, at least, my job in telling that story.

I've always felt, even with sketches, that if you don't care about these people, then it doesn't matter.

The interesting thing about doing serial television is that the character is growing separate from you, the character and the show are growing, and you get to observe that and participate with it in a way that I think is actually really exciting for an actor.

Actors do movies because you want to make a connection; you want an audience to recognise themselves in what it is that you're depicting.

Audiences need to engage with characters.

I don't think the challenge is asking an audience to like a character; it's inviting them to try and understand them... then making that journey entertaining and worth their while. It's a classic trick, but it's human, and it allows characters to have more depth.

When I read a script, the important thing is that I can connect in some way with that character and have some idea from what his story is that I can tell that story too, because that's all acting is, is storytelling.

What audiences love with series is that they can invest in characters for such a long period of time, and it's the same for actors. You can truly tell your story; then it's done.

You have to think about storytelling over the long haul: what is going to engage an audience for, potentially, years and how characters can become deeply involving for an audience.

For me, it's all about smaller character-driven pieces, about finding a person that I connect with and that I'm interested in bringing to life.

I wish to continue to essay roles that will help me find my place in the audience's hearts.