The process changes slightly from role to role. Obviously, there are different things you're called on to do. You're not digging deep for Basher Tarr like I was for Paul Rusesabagina, but at the end of the day it's still all make-believe and you still are trying as realistically as you can to depict these characters.
The women I draw all have the same sort of personality. I can't draw gentle girls; I only know how to draw ones who are strong-willed.
I just did an arc with Warren Ellis - and no one else on the planet could get away with this, because I think this is like harassment? - But Warren felt like there was a depiction of Spider-Woman where it looked like her waist perhaps didn't contain any internal organs. And he suggested very quietly ... 'You should fix that, or else I will come to your house and nail your feet to the floor and set your house on fire.' ... And it totally got fixed!
It's very rare that I play cool people. I'm not sure what that says about me.
It's extremely seldom that anybody wants me to change what I've written about them. Generally I portray them in a good light, if they're friends.
If I open a Batman book, and he doesn't look right, I can't do it. It has so much to do with the art.
Remember that you are an actor in a play, and that the Playwright chooses the manner of it: If he wants you to act a poor man you must act the part with all your powers; and so if your part be a cripple or a magistrate or a plain man. For your business is to act the character that is given you and act it well. The choice of the cast is Another's.
Providing accurate portrayals of characters is something I want to pay ample attention to.
When you play a character that exists or existed, there's a stronger responsibility that you have. You owe that person and then you owe the family, you owe history, you owe the victims, the victims' families.
As an actor, when you encounter a psychopathic personality, you naturally want to make him 'bigger than life,' as the Americans say.
We like our villains to be evil from head to toe.
The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
Gene Hackman's portrayal of Lex Luthor did not exist in comic books. This is not my Lex Luthor, but I really like it.
I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you're interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subjects may - and from my experience probably will - protest your portrait of them.
Normally, I love to go to the movies and when I see a character portrayed by different actors at different ages, it kind of pops a little bit for me. It brings me out of the movie experience. Now we have the technology to cure that.
Everything 'Atonement' does, it does incredibly well, including depicting characters of varying ages and temperaments and showing the intensity of early romantic love and connection and the very different intensity of haunting regret.
Writers who aren't from rural states in the Midwest or the West often treat such people as if they were the Waltons or the Beverly Hillbillies.
The trickiest thing is that a lot of times in 'Venom' comics, they'll reveal part of Eddie, and he'll be like a Venom body with an Eddie head, or he'll do that classic split frame face.
I'm attracted to working with comedians because they don't have that stars' idea of what a hero should be. The downside is they're always addressing the camera too much.
Of the two, I prefer those who render vice lovable to those who degrade virtue.
Coming back from doing 'The Hobbit,' you think 'Sherlock' is realistic, but of course, it's not that realistic.
The movie portrayed me as this person who cussed every 10 seconds, and I don't cuss like that.
I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.
I don't think you realize how often on television people are not like anyone we know or have known.
Richard was in heavy, heavy costume, he could hardly sit, you know, and I turned up and they put me in two layers of silk, so I played him much lighter - you know, floating around in a pair of slippers, a bit of a hippy.
