Ramy Youssef Quotes

I like taking a character at the most intense moments of their lives and exploring all that in full and then moving on.

When I watch a movie, someone's beauty isn't what engages me: it's what's going on internally. And I imagine it's what the audience thinks, too.

You're living with these characters for years and years, you need to have a lock on who they are as people, what they like, what they don't like, what they experience, and what they go through.

But I also wanted to give them an intelligent emotional journey, without having to suspend reality - to be able to look at those characters and see reasons for the relationships and why what happens happens.

The scene is never really about moving the story forward on 'Breaking Bad.' That's the functional veneer of the scene, but it's always about what's going on with the characters.

As an actor, you want to be able to move your character forward into new ground, but also it's really interesting to go backwards and unpeel those layers and the interesting elements of what your character is and what informs the decisions that you make so that you can have as much meat to work with.

You always start a fight scene or an action scene with, 'What are we learning about this character at the moment, and how are we gonna arc him or her in the next three minutes,' and it's no different with 'Deadpool' or 'Atomic Blonde' or 'John Wick.'

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

With any role I play, I find out what the human problem is first.

You don't want to have a character say what's bothering him; you want to define characters by action.

I think you've got to understand your character and where they're coming from.

Every song in 'Groundhog Day' works to forward the story in a chronological, narrative sense, to illuminate the state of mind of the person singing it and comment on the world.

As an actor, you are always looking for subtext, for layers, for what's going on underneath.

As actors, you don't actually need to know the future of the character. You just need to know the backgrounds.

A whole film is just about arriving at a moment where you hopefully transfer some feeling to the audience.

Movie characters rarely get to think out loud or talk very much about their emotions. Instead they have to, very briefly, show their feelings through their action or through dialog.

Why would a novel - which is all about the inward processes of people's developing feelings and developing relationships - why would you be able to portray that in pictures with as few words as possible, which is what the best films are?

I like my characters to be ones I think about long after I've finished reading the script.

But at the same time, the commonplace statement about them is true: every character is the hero of his own story. Each has a justification for his actions that is convincing to him. It's fun to give these people voices.

I'd never really been in a series, where you see a man at different points and perspectives in his life. Usually it's a film, where I'm playing a character who just comes in and offers something up.

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

I like films to be complete in their written form.

There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.

Even the pictures I was doing at college - a little narrative based on a butterfly catcher, or a chimney sweep - the images were always telling stories. They were all scenarios and moods which I storyboarded and worked through - it's exactly what I do now.

The work evolves when you get another part, and then you're getting called on to solve difficult characters, to inject a note of humanity into them. It's more interesting for me to do that than to stand around and be sunny.