Akira Toriyama Quotes

I don't believe in anti-heroes. Duke Wayne played a mean guy but never an anti-hero.

A villain can be stylish, and his actions don't have to be explained. Heroes are boring in comparison, even anti-heroes, as there's always a justification for their bad actions.

With all due respect to the other writers, I don't want to disparage any other writers; I don't want to have to invent a bigger villain than Deathstroke so Deathstroke can seem heroic fighting this bigger villain. I'd rather just have Deathstroke be who is, and he's kind of a bastard.

I don't play the role of a villain, really, but I like playing anti-hero kind of roles. I like characters where there's conflict, drama, and more personal investment than just being heroes.

It's not that fun to just play a villain, without any reasoning behind it.

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.

When my lady and I sit down and watch TV, I find she gets annoyed at characters because they don't do what she would do in the situation. I'm always like, 'Well, she has to do that because that's what the story is.'

As the actor, you can't go in saying, 'I'm the bad guy.' You've got to think your reasons for doing what you're doing are good.

The most fascinating powers don't mean a thing if the guy's poorly motivated or dull, and the most generic powers won't hurt a well-motivated character. Personality and motivation are what make Magneto, Magneto and not Cosmic Boy. The powers work for him, but it's his motivation that makes him the character he is.

For me, one of the most beautiful and rewarding aspects of serial reality TV is that characters can move freely along a spectrum of heroism and villainy.

When it comes to films, people often don't differentiate between the message of a bad central character and the message of the film itself. They are two separate things.

In 'Cavalry,' I had one scene where I was playing a pretty awful character.

People always tell me I'm nothing like my character. Well, hopefully not! He's a character who's very defined. He was purposefully written by Jo Rowling as very one-dimensional in the first few books, because you're supposed to hate him.

I don't think of 'Macbeth' as the villain. I don't think of 'King Lear' as the villain. I don't think of 'Hamlet' as the villain. I don't think of 'Travis Bickle' as the villain.

If the reader cares, I don't think it matters so much whether your hero is in fact an anti-hero.

I also try very hard to create characters - both heroes and villains - with psychological depth.

I am, to be quite honest, sick of hero stories.

It's exciting that you've got an entire season to experience 24 hours of highly dramatically charged human experience. It allows for the close inspection of minutiae in behaviour.

What's great about 'Game of Thrones' is they change the perspective, the POV, all the time. So you will have one story told by one character and you'll go, 'Oh my God, horrible', and then maybe the season after you have the same story told but from the person you thought was just the most horrible, vile creature.

It's not all 'Jane Eyre' out there. In her sweet, honorable, slightly passive-aggressive way, Jane was as perfect as a protagonist can get while remaining interesting; in fact, she's one of my favorites. But most characters are more morally ambiguous.

The thing that I love is human behavior - why people do what they do, who they are, and the choices that they make - and that has to always be plot driven.

In most shows, there's usually a hero or a protagonist, and even if there are multiple heroes or protagonists, most shows try and make it so you really always know who's the good guy and who's the bad guy.

Look, we're in the time of the anti-hero.

A lot of the time, a moral compass is all that separates a hero from being a villain; otherwise, the two are very much the same. Both are generally the richest and most complex characters, and they get to have all the fun. I guess it's those types of roles that I ultimately gravitate towards.

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