Mahershala Ali Quotes

People can do bad things for good reasons, or for what they think are good reasons.

'Evil' is quite a blanket term. People aren't the demonic characters we would like them to be sometimes.

Virtue is not photogenic, so I liked playing bad guys. But, whenever I played a bad guy, I tried to find something good in him, and that kept my contact with the audience.

The thing is, I never see my characters as psychopaths. I see them as really crippled victims who just happen to do bad things. And I never see them as bad guys; I see them as darker characters. I never see anything as good or bad; it's more light or dark, and the in-between is the grey.

You know, I think a lot of times what happens when we as actors know we're playing a bad guy is we get into bad guy mode. You know what, man? In real life, bad people do good things too and good people do bad things. So you don't necessarily have to be the stereotypical bad guy to still do bad things.

I personally feel that no human is a hero or a villain. All of us have our grey sides, and that is why grey interests me: because it's more human, more life-like.

Our errors and our controversies, in the sphere of morality, arise sometimes from looking on men as though they could be altogether bad, or altogether good.

The idea that people do very bad things for sometimes very good reasons, feels reasons.

You can choose who you want to be the hero [in Hard Candy], but youll be second-guessing yourself -- theres just no right answer. Our society is obsessed with finding good and finding evil, but I think were all capable of anything.

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 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.

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.

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.

I love to start characters in a place where you think you know them. We can make all kinds of assumptions about them and think they have no redeeming qualities, but like everyone, they're complex.

People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.

I have my dark side. You have your dark side. From the second that we have a brain, there are things that are not right - we are human beings with all these illusions and complexes and everything. That's attractive to me.

We can bring to characters dark and bright sides that nobody even dreams about.

There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That's where the real art lies. See, I always suspect characters who are painted as lovely, decent human beings. I would always question where the darkness lies.

Not to oversimplify it, somebody once said a good rule of thumb in interpreting a character is to find the good in the bad people that you portray and the bad in the good.

I believe strongly that characters are five-dimensional, and they're complicated, and life is complicated, and people are complicated.

I'm interested in people that don't always do the right thing, its much more akin to what I know about life.

Everyone on the planet has a dark and a light. That's a multi-dimensional character.

I think any character has to be well-rounded, whether they are male or female - they have to be complex and make choices that maybe we don't agree with, you know? I guess that's what makes them human.

Life is not simple, and people can't be boxed into being either heroes or villains.