Jack Gleeson Quotes

I thought that would be kind of cool, to make a bad guy look sympathetic.

I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do.

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

At the end of the day, what I try to bring to villainous characters is a sense of humanity.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

If you don't care for the villain, if you don't love him and hate him at the same time, then he's just boring.

I think any time anybody sees the bad guy show emotion and you're not hitting the audience over the head, there's always a tinge of empathy for that individual.

You hope that when you're playing someone possibly unsympathetic that you can bring them something redeeming, something people can hang onto.

I loved the challenge of being able to take a character who could be thrown away as 'crazy' and making her identifiable to the audience - also, to give her a vulnerability that people would cheer for.

I think that it's possible to have someone who is an anti-hero, who does tear hearts out and break necks, and you can still relate to him on a certain level.

The challenge is, how do you take someone who's supposed to be a villain and make that appealing and lovable? You have to empathize with him and put yourself in his shoes and root for him and want him to have the things he wants.

There's something really charming about a character that is fundamentally flawed and does some pretty despicable things, but yet you still kind of love him.

It seems to me that most characters, in anything, are flawed in some way, just like most people. You look for the good in the flawed people and vice versa, and then try and make them appealing in some way.

The villain of any story is often the most compelling character.

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.

I haven't spent my entire career playing the guy in the bad hat, although I have to say that the bad guy is frequently much more interesting than the good guy.

If you think about Shakespeare, you remember Richard III and Macbeth before you remember Ferdinand, whose role is just to fall in love and be a bit of a wimp. I love the baddies. More important, though, is making the baddies somehow, weirdly, understood.

No matter how heinous someone's behaviour, if you make them a comic character, you can't expect people to hate them.

No actor can play a villain if they don't sympathise with him or her - otherwise the character just becomes a two-dimensional caricature.

If you can make a character likable that's not very nice, that's the challenge of the job.

Every actor will tell you it's so much more fun to play the bad guy because usually those characters are more complex and more broad and more interesting, and have more sides to them.

I try to find what makes even the worst, most despicable character sympathetic at his or her core.

The thing is, when you paint somebody in all of their colors, they're never all bad or all good. Even the worst person has humanity in there somewhere.

The audience likes a speaker with the same weakness and the same virtues that they themselves have.

The best strategy for making people care about what happens is if they empathize with both sides. If you just have a Villain with a capital V, it becomes very two-dimensional.