Timothy Spall Quotes

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

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

We, people, are so very, very complicated that no matter how well drawn a fictional character is, they can't get anywhere near as complex as a real person.

In many ways, acting is really like a science to me to figure out the human behavior of any character that I'm playing.

That's the joy of acting - you get to play people who are not you; you get to explore the dark, hidden sides of yourself.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

As an actor, you express certain things because they need to be expressed, and then you don't really feel a need to do it again. I want to feel something else, you know?

It's difficult to gauge that. With a bad guy you just know you're bad. To play a nice guy is harder - unless you are a very nice person like me of course.

It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a man by trying to imagine who they are.

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.

Being a good actor is sort of understanding the complexity of the human psyche and also knowing that we are none of us perfect.

I think humans are fascinating in general. We're so weird. We do so many quirky things, and we don't even know it. There's just so many layers upon layers of nuances in everything we do, and the most fun part as an actor is trying to get into all those nuances, whether they're conscious or unconscious.

One of the things you learn as an actor is that human beings are capable of almost anything. I'm sort of in the business of illustrating that fact.

I love working with actors who will just go, 'Oh O.K., let's try it and see where it goes,' and 'Let's see what we can discover.'

I am trained in theatre, and so I take time to study and get into the skin of a character.

I always ask the actors, 'What have you never done before?'

I have made 34 pictures, 10 of them for Disney, and none of them for Disney were really bad characters. So I think that recently I have kind of begun to hide behind certain actor's devices in order to make a dividing line between what I used to do and the characters I have been asked to do today.

There's this whole list of old personalities that I can act, as corny as that sounds, or as method actor as that sounds.

The work for the actor is always the same. We're looking for a human being. We're looking for believable human behavior.

When you're playing a character who's cruel, look for the places where he's kind. When you're playing a character who is unhappy, look for the places where he has a glint of merriment.

I love actors. I enjoy their company, and I get excited each and every time they bring a character I've written to life. Every so often a talented actor doesn't hook in correctly to a character; or someone gets lost in a labyrinth of over-complicated thoughts, and the character and play suffer. However, most of the time I find actors either end up doing exactly what was in my head, or sometimes do something even better.

What's amazing about the show ["Girls"] - the first (season) is about the girls and then the second (season) is about the boys as well. There's something so human about it.

As an actor, doing it for 30 years, with every movie, you're trying to figure out a way to make it more naturalistic and more organic to humanity. When you have lines like, "Never let the monster out," it's hard.

You don't have to kill somebody to play a murderer. You have to read the script and interpret the character.

I think as you mature as an actor things open up to you in a lot of ways, especially if you do work on yourself.