Seth Gabel Quotes

You've got to understand what makes the character human.

You don't play villains like they are villains. You play them like you know exactly where they are coming from. Which hopefully you do.

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.

I want to give my characters nuance.

You can play women who have a face on or who zip something up, but you have to dig deeper to actually find the humanity and real aspects.

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

Like anything, you've gotta find the humanity in the characters.

I think one of my big skills is making unlikable characters likable or real in some way. No matter how hateful people are, there's always something vulnerable about them, or something that you can understand or relate to. I think that's my job as an actress - to find those.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

I think difficult characters are very rewarding to do. They often have facets to them and this and that.

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.

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

I love the powerful woman who's complicated. There's no push to be one thing or another thing. It's all human. That's what you look for as an actor: characters written and portrayed in the most human way possible.

Everybody is the way they are because of certain events that have happened in their life. Oftentimes you'll meet somebody who seems a certain way, and then you realize, 'Oh, that guy's actually the sweetest man I know. But I wouldn't have known that from the outset because that's hidden.'

I totally respond to complex characters, and I'm not interested in anything too simple.

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.

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

Even if I'm playing a bad guy, I work hard to make him multi-leveled and interesting.

It's important to determine not just the quality of your mind but the fullness of your heart.

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 try genuinely, when I'm playing a character, to not judge them and just to inhabit someone as how one sees them. That being said, you also want to make sure that you don't blur the edges of people too much because humans are naughty and complicated beings.

I'm always interested in getting to know people, and that means vilified people as much as those celebrated. You find out that heroes aren't always so heroic, and villains have some bit of humanity in them.

I always want my character to have dimension, no matter what phase of life or situation they find themselves in.

If you go into something saying, 'I'm the bad guy,' you do yourself a disservice as an actor. It's always about trying to find the humanity in a character.

Sometimes, we only get to know someone as one aspect of who they are. Then you start peeling back the layers and understanding more and more about who they are - their vulnerabilities, their fears, their joys, all those other words that equal humanity.