Christian Cooke Quotes

I don't try to intellectualize characters too much. But I always think of the audience. I always make sure that my characters are likeable.

You can't tell an audience to like a character. And I think the best way to get the audience on someone's side is to embarrass them.

People seem to need a likable protagonist more than ever.

I try to have all my characters have a sense of humor. To me the most interesting thing is a desperate character. I think desperation is funny.

You know that's why people don't like unlikeable characters. It's not that they're not interesting. Everybody knows the most interesting character in a book or a movie or whatever narrative is the villain.

When I sat down with the creators of the show [Longmire], back when we were first starting to do the pilot, Branch was not that interesting on the page. What really sold me on the show and the character was their vision for him. It took the whole first season to flesh him out.

I don't intentionally try to find the scripts with unattractive characters, but I think that if a character is described in a script as heart-stoppingly beautiful, and there's nothing else said about her, it just doesn't hold a lot of interest for me.

I've done a number of films. I've been around this. I think the biggest challenge is just getting the script right, the way that you want the script to be. It's really about capturing the complexity of emotions and creating the kind of characters that people will want to watch every week.

Every actor, I don't care what they say, their roles are a lot more interesting than we are, and at the end of the day, it's still entertainment or fantasy. I think we can learn a lot from the characters we play and I find that the characters are even more noble than myself.

Well, I think “likability” is an overused word. I don’t watch people 'cause I like them; I watch them because they’re compelling. Sympathetic is a little different... Likable just thins you out. Working to make a character likable is what kills most TV shows.

I always think that you have to have a certain understanding of what an audience would want to see from you as a public person as well as a character.

I think that's the fundamental thing - you can go anywhere you like as long as you're following a character that the audience likes and understands.

To my way of thinking, whether it's a superhero movie or a romance or a comedy or whatever, the most important thing is you've got to care about the characters. You've got to understand the characters and you've got to be interested. If the characters are interesting, you're half-way home.

You're responsible for your own character to a degree, because when it comes to the final draft of the script, you might say, "Well, I think maybe I could add this here, add that there." But I find that I write just as well for the other characters as I do for myself. I think.

I'm not sure that it's easy to find very interesting female characters in Hollywood movies.

Trying to find a human side to the character is a way to give them a chance to have people like them.

I think I had the good fortune to watch Sly the Artist [Sylvester Stallone]; to watch him in all arenas. As an actor, not many people get to see him turn that character on, they don't understand that he's playing a role.

Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.

You've got to have a likeability factor, I think, in your comedy characters. If the guy's really, really funny but you just don't like him or her, then you're never going to root for them.

It's great to be able to play the bad guy role because you always get a lot to do, but I'm always looking at the why. How does a person get to that particular point? It's those little cogs in the wheel that make it interesting for me to play. Ultimately, I hope for the audience to be engaged with it because it is going to take a turn.

It's extreme. The character comes back from the dead, and, at first he doesn't know where he is, how he got there.... How does that tie in with the physicality? I just didn't think he should be too healthy-looking, so I lost some weight for the role.

I'm hesitant to do leading man character roles because I think they can be a little boring in terms of needing to be the everyman who navigates the amazing stuff around them.

If you speak in a different accent, you begin to move in a slightly different way. You think in a slightly different way. It's part of trying to find what makes a character.

When it comes to thinking about how a character talks, there are literary and language considerations. For actors to be able to differentiate between themselves and the characters they are playing while at the same time remain in character and spontaneous requires a sophisticated combination of skills and spirit.

I think in every character there are aspects of yourself that you bring to it. But then it would be really boring to just play yourself.