Stories teach us empathy. They reveal to us ourselves in the skins of others.
As actors, you don't actually need to know the future of the character. You just need to know the backgrounds.
I do a lot better if I sit around and think about a character for a couple of months.
You're living with these characters for years and years, you need to have a lock on who they are as people, what they like, what they don't like, what they experience, and what they go through.
Insight into character comes from listening intently to the spoken word. The physical person, their charisma, charm and dramatic flair is more often used to persuade audiences, as they use these stealth tools of disguise and deception.
The point of my explanation is I'm very subjective when it comes to describing my characters: they are all a little bit a part of me from the outside in or the inside out - but to put your mind at ease, I built Paul Snider from the outside in.
Studying cows, pigs and chickens can help an actor develop his character. There are a lot of things I learned from animals. One was that they couldn't hiss or boo me.
The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.
That's one of the great thing about writing is that you get to be in someone's head.
I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.
Most people probably don't know that Joe has a romantic side to him.
You've got to empathize with every character you play.
When your characters are really living they tell you what they do.
There's always a connection to be made whether you're playing a psychopath or whatever. It doesn't really matter; you've got to find this thing that you relate to with each character otherwise you're missing something.
The producers felt that 24 would be good for the audience, to really get to know who these 12 and 12 are.
I don't really decide what the core of the story is before I write. I write to figure out what the story is. And I think the characters end up talking to you and telling you what they want to be doing and what is important to them. So in some ways, your job is to listen as much as it is to write.
I'm glad that people have responded well to it, so far. I'm thankful for that. But, I'm also excited now that I have a better grasp of this character than I did before. I want to take it even further and really explore who Glenn is.
It's very hard to connect with a character when you haven't gotten a sense of who they are.
I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.
I do figure every angle of a guy I'm acting - but not consciously 'til afterward.
I use voiceover just like I use dialogue. There's a way to give out information or give out insight to the character or give out their worldview, and maybe you have to slip in exposition, but it's all about how you write it.
Anybody can act. Correction. Anybody can act if they know their own weaknesses.
The thing with '24' is that because it moves so much, it's a challenge, and sometimes things get revealed about these characters as you go.
In a film, if you can capture what's going on underneath, you can begin to make a connection between the character and the people watching it.
When I shoot a film, I take my camera and put it among the characters and let it show you their world, their problems, their happiness and the little things that matter to them.
