Jeri Ryan Quotes

People come up to me and say, 'You are such a great bad guy.' The fact is that the antagonist in a movie is usually the most fun to play. You can stretch the role and do so much with it.

What I always studied in screenwriting from my mentor John Glavin was that the most interesting characters are characters with shades of gray.

There is more meat and mileage in complex characters, like 'Running with Scissors.'

I like fractured characters with human follies.

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

It seems to me that most characters, in anything, are flawed in some way, just like most people. You look for the good in the flawed people and vice versa, and then try and make them appealing in some way.

I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.

But I guess I like playing flawed guys 'cause it gives a place for the characters to go.

As an actor, I'm constantly striving to find the darkness in the lighter characters and the lightness in the darker characters.

Characters with no integrity are just as interesting as characters with lots of integrity.

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.

As actors, we want to choose somebody who has conflicts. I can't be always playing the girl next door. What's the challenge in that?

Villains are fun. I think the important thing in playing them is that they don't see themselves as villains. It lets you be a little more expansive.

A while ago, I did a television adaptation of 'Bleak House,' and the character I played, as far as I was concerned, had no redeeming features whatsoever. I wasn't about to try to find any; I didn't need to.

I've been playing the bad guy in the last seven or eight projects I've done. I like it. It's a lot more interesting! Being the good guy gets a little stale after a while, you know?

I'm attracted to playing people who aren't necessarily straightforward.

I try to pick characters that I find interesting and complex and that I feel I can bring something of myself to.

I always look to play flawed characters. I'm not very interested in playing somebody that's just, you know, the very nice one or the attractive one, or whatever, which a lot of female parts can just be written that way.

I think I've always been interested in playing people who are judged very harshly.

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.

It's much less interesting as an actor playing someone who's purely good or purely evil.

The villains that I play, I always think that they are grounded, wonderful people with enormous intellects who are very exciting to spend an evening with. I never see them as bad people.

There's more depth to Lionel. What I am finding so interesting about playing him is there's all these different layers. I prefer playing Lionel because he's a human being.

To me idealized characters are so boring to play, especially having grown up in the classical theater. That's a great experience, but as a woman, especially, you've played a lot of idealized characters. So when you've got someone who has weaknesses as well as strengths, that's interesting.

You know, we have to take these characters - who, granted, have their separate personalities but, on a lot of levels, are pretty two-dimensional - and make them into people with flaws, with insecurities.