I would love to play a negative guy, play the villain. It is always interesting to have shades to your character.
I'm not interested in the heroes or the villains. I'm interested in playing people.
I want to play a character with grey shades.
That's what attracts me to the kind of characters I try and write - that they're not cut and dried.
I want to give my characters nuance.
The more complicated the character, the better I am. It's the one-dimensional crap that I had to do for years that drove me crazy.
First of all, I would shoot myself if I ever had to play straight-forward characters that really don't have much of a past. Maybe it's just that I'm not a good enough actor to have to embellish, but I like having these really, really rich roles to play.
Beware 'good' main characters who have a limited repertory of culturally acceptable feelings, while your evil bastards have a full range of vivid, passionate feelings.
Back in the '30s, '40s and '50s, you had clear-cut heroes, clear-cut supervillains. Today, you have more of a blend, more of a gray area between the two. You have the rise of the sympathetic villain and the rise of the antihero.
I don't think of the characters as being good or bad because that doesn't help me as a writer.
Good people can do terrible things, and that's what life is all about, the complexities and grey areas. And often characters aren't written that way in movies, especially characters for women. So you end up being either one thing or the other.
On the other side, if Im playing a good guy, then he has some problems too. Thats what makes people interesting, in life and in fiction.
In all good westerns, the good guy is always a little bit questionable because he kind-of has to make moral judgments.
No actor can play a villain if they don't sympathise with him or her - otherwise the character just becomes a two-dimensional caricature.
I don't like characters who are either good or bad. I just don't experience that in life, so my writing hasn't evolved that way.
Certainly, your characters - whether they are superheroes are not - should have foibles. They should have problems; they should have things that their powers can't solve. That's what makes them nuanced, interesting characters. They can have intense motivations. They should have intense motivations to do what they do.
The thing that I love about 'Scandal' is every character, it's not clear if they're good or bad. Everyone is both good and bad.
I have a tendency to think that when you portray baddies in movies, they come out more human than good guys.
When Alan Rickman, a dear friend of mine, played villains, he always made it complicated. He didn't redeem what they did, but he made you feel that it was hard for them to be so horrible.
I like to play characters that are convincing, that aren't just straightforward and nice.
I want to give every single character the dimensions and complexity of a main character.
Before we ever had a script or anything, I was attracted to the idea of playing a character that housed within himself two opposing traits.
I like characters that are complex. I don't like people who are simple to play and are either black or white.
I totally respond to complex characters, and I'm not interested in anything too simple.
I really want my acting to be definitive a lot of times, but I must feel like in any given moment there is a lot of things going on with Rose. I kept telling Denzel [Washington] throughout filming [Fences] that the house is her joy and her tomb.
