Nicolas Cage Quotes

I happen to still like really dark, dramatic, fractured characters. They're the reason I got into movies.

I like characters who have faults. I'm drawn to darker people.

I tend to always love material with flawed protagonists and morally ambiguous people.

I am a fan of dark movies and dark complex characters, and I love to take on a character like that.

I think I'm drawn to characters with complexity or who are under duress in some way and have some conflict going on.

The larger-than-life thing is definitely what I'm after. I've always drawn dark stories. Occasionally, I'll try a perfect hero, but it's a real stretch for me. I like 'em warts and all, and obsessive and weird.

I like complicated characters.

The beauty of the characters on 'Justified' is that all the human beings that are written are all flawed. Even with the good guys, you see darkness surface.

With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.

I'm always going with my visceral reaction when I read a script. I am more drawn to characters who are conflicted, and in developing a character exploration. If it's a baddie, I'm rarely intrigued, and if it's a goody two-shoes - too much of a good guy - I'm not, either.

I love playing characters who are multilayered and multidimensional and have a darkness to them, which makes them more realistic and more fun to play.

However, for my characters to have depth, they have to be human and complex, have both qualities and flaws, do the right things at times, and at others, things they'll regret having done and not necessarily know how to undo.

I like fractured characters with human follies.

Internationally if you see, 'Narcos' and 'House of Cards' are all very dark shows with very dark characters. The audience may hate the character but they will love the actor.

I think all interesting characters have some kind of a complex.

I'm interested in flawed protagonists. I was raised on them.

One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines.

I'm always attracted to anti-hero roles.

In 'Garden Party' or '40 Days and 40 Nights,' I played characters who people don't necessarily like; I just find some humanity in them.

I like devilish, thorny, dirty, mean roles, muck and mire, unbelievably sad, unbelievably happy, burdened. Inner conflict - that's where drama is.

The thematic bucket of vomit that I've been chained to since I was about 9 is the moral complexity of anti-heroism. I have always been interested in good people who do bad things for understandable reasons.

For an author, the nice characters aren't much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They're doing it for themselves.

It's kind of fun when you're playing characters that aren't quite on the up and up and people still like you.

I think that Gollum is really the character who is a very human character, and he's very flawed, like most humans are, and has good and bad sides.

I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to heroes who do bad things and to villains who think they're the good guys, but I do find that moral ambiguity and conflict makes for great characters.