Football is full of different characters but there are perhaps none who have a split personality quite like Jose Mourinho, as I can testify from personal experience.
As an actor, you use the things from yourself that you can apply to the character.
I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.
There's how, basically, Son Goku from 'Dragon Ball' doesn't fight for the sake of others but because he wants to fight against strong guys. So once 'Dragon Ball' got animated, at any rate, I've always been dissatisfied with the 'righteous hero'-type portrayal they gave him.
In 2013, I started playing Fara Sherazi on 'Homeland.' I love playing her, not just because she's a strong woman, but because for the first time, a Muslim woman is being portrayed on television as a regular person, rather than a cliche or collection of stereotypes.
The trap in Hamlet is he's the most passive of Shakespeare's characters. He's not a Richard III, not out there taking a lot of action. It's a lot of asides and soliloquies where he's wrapped in angst, and that's not a very interesting character.
I do a lot better if I sit around and think about a character for a couple of months.
I'm not a classically trained actor. I'm not a product of Stavlovski method or anything like that.
The casting of 'Slumdog Millionaire' is a dream. Anil Kapoor, as the sleazy TV host, diamonds winking in his earlobes, has never been better; the quietly understated Irrfan Khan turns in another bravura performance as the police inspector whose questioning brings out Jamal's story.
King Lear alone among these plays has a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure.
Batman is like the audience's eyes and ears in 'Justice League Dark.'
Ariel is the most boring Disney princess.
I like to have a much greater base and know a lot more about my character before I begin to fill the person. So a lot of it really entails sit-downs with them, determining who she is, where she came from, and why she reacts a certain way, and then I was really able to expand upon a lot of that and create a lot of that story on my own.
As an actor, the training I received was that I walk through the world as an observer of life and of people. My job is to actually be looking out all the time and watching people.
The way I prepare is through script analysts and back story. I create back story for a character based on script analysts, filling in as many details as possible. I also do a lot of research.
If you know me, Thanos is my favorite character.
And at NYU, I went to the Atlantic Theater Company, and they have two main points. One of them is to always be active in something instead of just feeling it. And the other is figuring out your character.
When I research a role it does get a little crazy and maybe even a little stupid.
I have no idea what 'method actor' means.
I was doing the work I was capable of doing with my own native talent, but when I looked at actors like Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean, Kim Stanley, and Geraldine Page, I knew that they knew something that I didn't know. I wanted to find out what that was.
In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience. Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy.
What I've tended to do is to use my own experiences to get into someone else's mind, like in Wuthering Heights.
There is more meat and mileage in complex characters, like 'Running with Scissors.'
Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay.
For a long while, I found Parker impossible. He went away for 23 years. I tried to bring him back a few times, and I sort of figured out where he came from, why he went away, and why he came back. The thing that I have to tap into for Parker is in some way the outsider. If I can tap into the outsider, I can write about Parker, and if I can't, I can't.
