Mahershala Ali Quotes

Can I, just one time, play the good guy?

I'm very glad people love 'Breaking Bad,' but the harder character to write is the good character that's as interesting and as engaging as the bad guy.

In all our pictures, we had an antagonist who becomes the good guy, and the underdog fulfills his quest.

In any story, the villain is the catalyst. The hero's not a person who will bend the rules or show the cracks in his armor. He's one-dimensional intentionally, but the villain is the person who owns up to what he is and stands by it.

It's as boring to see a completely evil villain as it is to see a completely good guy.

One of the big things that if you've got a guy who is doing things that other people could view as evil or bad, then you've got to find the silver lining: you've got to find the thing that makes this guy a good guy.

In order to have your best good guy, you have to be that bad guy.

In all good westerns, the good guy is always a little bit questionable because he kind-of has to make moral judgments.

Good guy' or 'bad guy', hero or anti hero; doesn't matter to me, what role I play, only the character have something magical.

I think at this point in my life, I'd like to play more good guys than bad guys.

Are there any good guys on 'Prison Break?' I suppose there might be. I can't honestly say whether I'm a good guy or a bad guy or I'm a good guy in wolf's clothing or sheep's clothing.

The bad guys are not typical; they are not just bad, they are interesting. They might be good or bad.

If you have not been a villain at a certain point in time, you will never be a hero. And the day you are a hero, you may become a villain the next day.

The older I get the more I realize there's no real good guys or real bad guys, and I'm curious about how the good guys got good and how the bad guys got bad.

A lot of the time, a moral compass is all that separates a hero from being a villain; otherwise, the two are very much the same. Both are generally the richest and most complex characters, and they get to have all the fun. I guess it's those types of roles that I ultimately gravitate towards.

What makes 'The Wire' a beautiful story is how true to life it is. In other shows, you have a good guy and a bad guy. In 'The Wire,' bad guys are trying to be good, good guys are doing bad. You have real life. The people who do bad get bad things done to them.

I have a tendency to think that when you portray baddies in movies, they come out more human than good guys.

You can't play a bad person; you can only be a person who does bad things for the right reasons.

I learned the bad guys are not always bad, the good guys are not always good.

The very first things that I did, even in theater, were bad guys. They are meaty roles for the most part. With the bad guy you have more freedom to experiment and go further out than with a good guy.

There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.

Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.

I don't believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don't want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as in life, most people are a mixture.

A character on screen that's the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy,' they're never interesting. There's got to be an internal struggle, the duality is important to find.

In the best stories, people are morally complex; they are flawed. We read them because the world is flawed, and we want to see it truthfully represented. And because it can be thrilling to be shocked and upset, and even to feel, for chilling moments, what it's like to be a bad person.