Tom Noonan Quotes

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.

I always felt like Azula and Long Feng were much more interesting villains and three-dimensional characters than Ozai, who was just sort of a big jerk. Like a really big jerk, but not very complex or human.

If you're playing the bad guy, you have to find what you like about them.

I don't believe in villains - just people who channel their energy in the wrong way.

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.

I never play a villain that I don't have something I can either do or say so the audience sees there is something redeemable about them. In other words, I don't want to do evil for evil's sake. I don't want to do Jason slasher movies. There's no point in that.

Evil is such a simplistic way to describe any character, be it Iago or Caliban, or any character from history.

I tend to look for the good in bad people and the bad in good people, to make them human. 'Cause I don't think that people generally are that black and white. Maybe in movie-land they can be... but that isn't necessarily all there is.

Operas elucidate, in a way sometimes absent in other theatrical productions, the very human fact that in every hero, there is a thread of duplicity. In every villain, there is another side to consider: We don't have to like him or her, but we are compelled to think about motivation.

I always look at films as real stories with real people in real situations. That's why I struggle with the whole notion of calling someone the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy', because I think we all have potential to do good things and all have the potential to do bad things.

I happen to like movies and plays about dislikeable people as long as I get to know why they are what they are.

The horror aspect, the scary parts, are easy for me. I mean, I can get into that pretty easy, because I get scared. You have to invest yourself in these characters.

I find the trick to playing a villain is that you can't be bad for the sake of being bad. It has to be rooted in some sort of heartbreak.

I pretend something scary is in front of me.

I always try to find something I like about the bad guys and then try to find the mistakes and the flaws in the good guys.

I've never really been serious about my villainy. I don't have a master plan. I suppose my philosophy is: Every villain has a mother. For every cold-blooded killer on your screen, there's a little old lady somewhere who calls him 'sonny.'

Heroes aren't supposed to do bad things. That's what villains are for. So either the good supersedes the bad, or the bad makes it impossible to remember the good. We don't like it when such duality exists in one person. We don't want to know our heroes are human.

I'm attracted to those kinds of roles that could be good or could be bad, and you just don't know.

I never see my bad guys as simply bad. They want pretty much the same thing that you and I want: they want to be happy.

The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me.

I don't want to play a bad guy who doesn't have a bit of good in him.

When you're playing the good guy, you want to find the dirty parts - and when you're playing the bad guy, you want to find the vulnerability.

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.

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.

I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.