Leigh Whannell Quotes

When you see Robert Englund in a movie, you think he is the bad guy, but if I'm not the bad guy, and I'm supposed to just kind of fool the audience, it makes it a lot easier for whichever actor is the bad guy. So I find myself doing a lot of those, I think they're called red herring characters, faking out the audience.

I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.

For me, the worst writing generally just 'flips' things: this person's really a traitor; it was all a dream; etc. Nothing is so ruinous as a forced 'twist,' I think.

You know, it's always fun to play the bad guy at the end of the day.

And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.

I think that everybody likes the bad guy.

The villain drives the plot.

I misdirect the audience, so they have no idea where they are or who they're listening to.

Dramatically it's always more interesting to conceal rather than reveal things.

Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.

It was easy to be the bad guy throughout.

I can explain that shot. Arnold moved his wallet to the other pocket.

I'm the blackest villain of all time.

It may sound surprising, but a joke and a crime novel work in very much the same way. The comedian/writer leads their audience along the garden path. The audience know what's coming, or at least they think they do until they get hit from a direction they were not expecting.

I love playing bad guys; they're always much more fun than the good guy.

I really want to do a dark character. Not really a bad guy, but someone dark and mysterious. Where everyone says, 'Ooh, it has to be her!' and at the end you find out it isn't. Just someone who looks guilty.

I am happy to play the bad man.

Every thriller needs a good bad guy; without a bad guy, there's no thriller.

Usually bad guys are much more fun to play and much more interesting to watch.

In fairy tales the bad guy is very easy to spot. The bad guy is always wearing a black cape so you always know who he is.

I would love to play just an all out bad guy who has fun being malicious. It would be totally unexpected, and that's what would make it exciting. Plus, bad guys don't see themselves as bad guys, so you could have fun with that.

Just in terms of when I got the script, the character I probably liked the least was Big Foster. Because even though he was central to the story and to that world, he was really written to be kind of a brute, a pig, a completely black-and-white bad guy.

I want to be the bad guy.

I like being a bad guy.

I'm a really evil person on TV! It's way more fun to be the bad guy.