Josh Gad Quotes

I'd never watch a horror film, but after I found out I was going to be in one, I watched, like, four of them, including The Shining, I was terrified - I couldn't sleep for days. But I wanted to get myself used to things I was going to see on the set.

Film, you get to go to other locations and live the culture for a little while. You also form a strong bond with your cast, which is a lot of fun. Plus, you only have to live with the character for a couple months at a time.

Before starring in 'Raman Raghav 2.0,' I must have watched only 20-odd movies, out of which eight were part of the 'Harry Potter' series.

You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.

My writing's like a journey. I'll know some of the stops ahead of time, and I'll make some of those stops and some of them I won't. Some will be a moot point by the time I get there. You know every script will have four to six basic scenes that you're going to do. It's all the scenes where your characters really come from.

When people embrace character, it informs their living, breathing moments in a scene so well.

In designing Supergirl, I wanted to embrace the past but more importantly, thrust her into the street-style action hero of today.

It's rather rare when you play an older character in a movie in a supporting role to even get an arc.

I think the more depth you build into the characters, and the more you see where they came from, the more fun you can have. Setting up different characters in different relationships is always helpful as you move forward.

Tolkien made the wrong choice when he brought Gandalf back. Screw Gandalf. He had a great death and the characters should have had to go on without him.

I suspect that the theme, the nature of the characters, and the method of getting from the beginning of the play to the end is already established in the unconscious.

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

Don't put your characters on a treadmill. They need to go new places, face new challenges and do new things.

The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and nothing happens if the characters don't change.

All that matters to me as a reader are characters. I want characters to be real, authentic, and rounded. I will be digging into characters for at least a month. Who they are. What they are like. Outside of the story.

I don't go home and pretend I'm August rather than just the actual lines I'm saying in the film. If you do it that way, it makes it more natural and second nature. After awhile you get used to it and there's so much, especially being in New York to film; you're always surrounded by American people.

I've never been trained as an actor. I'm no Phillip Seymour Hoffman or Johnny Depp.

Why do you keep reading a book? Usually to find out what happens. Why do you give up and stop reading it? There may be lots of reasons. But often the answer is you don't care what happens. So what makes the difference between caring and not caring? The author's cruelty. And the reader's sympathy...it takes a mean author to write a good story.

That is something I try to stress to the wrestlers nowadays - there is an epidemic of spot monkeys in the business. They often are so concerned with the fans' reactions that they're willing to kill themselves, while I am trying to help them move past that. It is not about the move, it's about the moment you create, and that's what I'm doing through my broken brilliance.

You're always choosing the start point and the end point. And almost by definition, the most interesting period is where something happens, as a result of which something is different at the end. And so to me, the idea that you know everything about a character at the beginning is sort of ridiculous. Something has to be revealed. I like it when the deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away. It's more challenging to me, but it's also just interesting. Those are the things I like to watch. I like to watch the evolutions of something.

Sarah Cornwell has a brilliant eye for the telling detail, and a wonderfully original way of embodying family history. I was captivated by her memorable characters and the perfectly paced revelations of their surprising relationships.

I don't think I had any idea at the time how to work with someone as masterful as he is. And I don't think at the time I really understood what was happening. I think I was in a space where I was like: there are all these things. I was shooting all these takes with David, and I was just confused, as a person, and as an actor feeling a little too big for my britches and that this thing was happening and then also not having enough skill yet, and technique to know exactly where I was, and know about the character.

It was seriously just a name. They didn’t tell you what to do. They didn’t tell you how they wanted the character to be - nothing. You went in to audition for this character name and that was it. When I started, before I came onto the set, I went to Gene Roddenberry and said: hey, what do you want from this guy? Who is he? And being as smart as he is, he said: don’t listen to what you’ve heard or read or seen in the past, nothing. Just make the character your own. And that’s what I did.

I really am a character actor, in my heart of hearts, because I really do like developing characters and painting a past for them.

There is no one without faults, not even men of God. They are men of God not because they are faultless, but because they know their faults, they strive against them, they do not hide them, and are ever ready to correct themselves.