Ulrich Thomsen Quotes

I think all interesting characters have some kind of a complex.

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

I want to give every single character the dimensions and complexity of a main character.

A lot of crime writing suffers from treading water. I feel an obligation to move the character on and not repeat myself. I try to fit him into a different period and a different agenda. That way, you learn slightly more about his personal history in the tradition of the unreliable narrator. It makes it more challenging to write.

I am attracted to the complexities and deeper truths of characters, and I can't name a favourite role any more than I can name a favourite food!

If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.

The work evolves when you get another part, and then you're getting called on to solve difficult characters, to inject a note of humanity into them. It's more interesting for me to do that than to stand around and be sunny.

I do build my own backstory as an actor. It's important to know where your characters have come from in order to know where they're going - in order to exist in that state of being.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

Same job, whether it's comedy or drama. Regardless of the weight of the role, I feel like the job is always kind of the same. Who is this person? What's this guy here, and how is he playing with this thing, and what's he trying to say? And what's the volley with all these other people around him?

Sometimes when you're playing a very intense character, a disturbed character, you find other layers. That's much more interesting to me, rather than just playing 'intense.' I find it too boring.

I do think you need to understand a character's motivation and perspective.

Hard science fiction, which is what I write, often is rightly criticized for having either negligible or unbelievable characterization, but the science I've actually studied most post-secondarily is psychology, and characterization is the art of dramatizing psychological principles.

In creating a new character, it's sometimes difficult to find a touchstone, a North Star that will always point you in the direction that character will travel.

Every character is challenging because, at the end of the day, you have to make something out of it.

Every character comes with its own challenges.

Emotions serve characters' purposes. That is their motivation.

You have to create characters - certainly in series TV - who people engage with. They don't have to be nice; you don't have to agree with them. But they do have to be compulsively watchable and believable and human, and you want to know what happens to them.

The action genre is not always the most synonymous with character development.

My thing is, I like playing guys who have a really interesting internal monologue.

Here's probably a short answer - I never feel in this piece that I'm stepping out and being Andrea Martin. I always feel like I'm Golde, so whatever Golde would do within those realms, that's what I would do.

You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.

But I also wanted to give them an intelligent emotional journey, without having to suspend reality - to be able to look at those characters and see reasons for the relationships and why what happens happens.

In a way, the characters often do take over.

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