Character Focus Quotes

I don't do issue writing. I do character writing.

The story of Bennet Omalu is a riveting story; it's just a riveting tale. I knew from the beginning if I stayed close to that kind of storytelling and focussed on the character, then the other stuff comes along with it, and the message becomes baked into the journey.

It's all about story and character with me, and I don't care if the job is on daytime or prime time or the web. Hey, give me a good character and someone to listen, and I'll do my acting on a street corner.

It's really, always, the story and the characters that come first, and the other things are kind of dealt with in time or, in fact, driven by the story.

You especially want to strive for that nuance on a show like 'The Flash,' which is different from 'Legends' in the sense that it's really, at its heart, a smaller show. It's a more intimate show, in a way.

Coming from theater, and having been to acting school, and done little, small Australian independent movies, a lot of the time, it's always about character.

It is very grand and sumptuous and awesome to look at but it was really about the characters for me.

I like character-driven stuff. It doesn't matter, the size of the part.

It's people stories that make good reading. I don't feel like I'm a sportswriter. I feel like I'm a guy who writes about people who happen to do sports. The best columns are the ones where you tie it somehow into the fabric of the country.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

Cable series have more time to focus on characters, and a structure that allows for a development in character as you go along. Network shows have a pressure of time and space that is completely different.

For me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.

I think that American audiences are more used to following one character.

'Ida' doesn't set out to explain history. That's not what it's about. The story is focused on very concrete and complex characters who are full of humanity with all its paradoxes. They're not pawns used to illustrate some version of history or an ideology.

I wouldn't say I'm a Method actor, but I do try to focus very deeply on what character I'm playing, and everything else goes out the window. I forget about everything. I try to get everything else out of my head.

Readers tell me that my novels are filled with significant mothers. Do I realize this? Do I do it on purpose? The truth is, I don't. I think of myself as a writer of family stories. I write more often than not from a male point of view, and I usually begin by focusing on siblings, spouses, even fathers, before I think about the mothers.

When you get to set, you don't try to play the plot; you just play the character.

The trick to being a good actor is getting so involved in your character that the camera disappears, the 50 bored guys eating doughnuts disappear, friends disappear. To get to that point when you don't have to think about it, you're just acting and reacting in those circumstances.

Put the hero back in the super hero movies, because I think 'super' might have taken over.

I like to be absorbed in what my character's doing.

We read the [Dracula] scripts, but Jess [De Gouw] and I are completely taken out of the hunts and anything with Van Helsing. We're just living our lives, as our characters.

When I'm playing a character, I don't wear perfume.

I had a plot connection that nobody understood for this fourth character, and decided, Oh, nobody gets it, that's all. I'll write another draft to make her make sense. It took me awhile to learn that these three people were the core of this play, which seems so obvious now.

I'm not really a plot writer - I'm more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.

As an actor, I'm ambivalent because I'm focused on the other person and what they're giving me, what I need to be giving them, and what the character is thinking.