Raza Jaffrey Quotes

I think often times on Joss Whedon's shows he can make you hate a character for a period and then love the character. He does it effortlessly.

I am fine playing 'Law & Order' and even the 'Jurassic' movies to be straight up, as far as the characters being portrayed there, but I never want to stay in straight-up land too long. I always wanted to do something where the character's world gets to be explored.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

The most I could hope for is to come and try and develop a character who is interesting, who is interesting to me, who is interesting to fans and who could contribute to the storytelling that is 'Law & Order: SVU.'

I'm sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.

The characters, to me, in 'Homeland' are not one note in any way.

For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.

To me, the struggle is to try to make a less-well-written or less-well-rounded character and find who they are. If you really get it, and it's all on the page, then it's really just gonna pop out at you.

Watching something like 'Orange is the New Black' - the development of the characters is amazing. Or 'Breaking Bad' or 'Mad Men' - those shows went on for so long. You become so invested in those characters, and I think that's a pretty magic thing.

It's always nice to do the flashbacks. That's what's so great about 'Scandal' is that we get to do flashbacks and then keep figuring out and discovering more things about our characters that make them fuller.

I don't think the challenge is asking an audience to like a character; it's inviting them to try and understand them... then making that journey entertaining and worth their while. It's a classic trick, but it's human, and it allows characters to have more depth.

There were certain things that I tried to do on 'Karamchand.' Initially, they were hated, but eventually everyone loved the characterization.

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

There is nothing like being able to develop a three-dimensional character over a long period of time. Sometimes you aren't able to fully portray a character because you only have a couple of scenes to do it in, and you don't get the full life and background of that character.

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

It's nice to create a character, not just within two scenes, but within the journey of a whole movie. It's fun to do that.

In a series, you really need to stay open-minded. It's not like a play or a film, where you can create and fully commit to your character's back-story.

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.

Characters can become boring. That's what's tricky about television. It goes on and on - you're playing this same character for five seasons and it gets easy to fall into just walking on the set and assuming you know how to play a scene.

I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal.

Quite honestly, I think that if you are making a lot of television programs with a central character, then ultimately it can become boring if you know nothing about them. I personally want to know, or get to know, things about a character. It doesn't mean to say that they still can't have a certain mystery about them.

There's no particular role that comes to mind that I'd like to take on, but for me, it's about playing interesting characters and not just two-dimensional ones.

After a while, the character sort of took over.