Lennie James Quotes

Most of my acting in general is about what's going on in the head, and the lines are just something that comes out.

I think playing a negative character is more difficult and challenging, since you have a lot to work on, and you have to put a lot of efforts.

I'm not very good at depicting the characters' psychology on the page.

The best characters to play are the ones who have deep internal conflict.

Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

If you know your characters well enough, you aren't trying to grasp for storylines. You're really thinking about their flaws and their passions and what they're chasing.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

Of course I want to have a deliciously seductive story on the surface which will keep people engaged and amused, but primarily, I'm interested in other things. It's the texture of any given moment that fascinates me: what is really going on between people or in somebody's mind.

An actor knows much more about a character than the character knows about himself.

Dialogue is not always the best way to show emotion, to show your thought process, or to reveal yourself, as a character.

In 'Yours Truly,' I was the centre of the story; I was the protagonist. There was a lot more happening inside the mind of the character which was not projected loudly through dialogue and action... As a performer, playing such a nuanced, internal character is challenging.

With any character, I try to focus more on who the character is and how they got to be who they are.

If there is a reason I'm able to make unsympathetic characters human, it's because it's my desire to find what drives the unsympathetic behavior. Almost always at the bottom of it is some deep insecurity. Putting your finger on what each individual's particular insecurity is goes a long way to fleshing that person out.

All my work is partly biographical. I mean, 'Crash' was absolutely that, absolutely. But you just wouldn't recognize me in most of those characters. But I was in every single one of those characters in 'Crash,' because those were all fears that I had felt. Things that I had thought in my deepest, darkest heart.

I discovered you can get closer to a character's thoughts and feelings in a book than in a film.

Once we got over the origin story, we could really delve deeper into their lives and characters and angst. So this movie actually has more heart, more humor.

To me, the psychology behind the character is critical. So I work very hard to get into the mind of the man that I'm going to be playing, because number one, I want to understand why he's doing what he's doing. It's essential, it's absolutely essential.

The characters I write about are very internal.

I like playing characters with internal problems.

A novel can do something that films and TV usually can't - a glimpse inside the characters' heads. I write very tight third person point of view, so the reader is right behind the eyes of each character, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel.

I look for characters who are emotionally driven.

I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.

I love my stories being multi-layered, and coming at it from different angles, so that you don't understand the film's true emotional motivation until the very end.

I know myself - I cannot just play a cliche. It has to be a character; it has to be written with the complexity of the human being behind. Could be bad, could be good, could be someone we would hate, but still, I need a reason for that influence, and I need to understand why.

The complexity of the emotional life of the play is what you live to work on.