Character Stagnation Quotes

With all due respect to 'The Vampire Diaries,' doing the same thing, over and over again, for essentially five years straight, it really becomes laborious and tedious, and it becomes a job. You obviously find gratification in acting, but you're playing the same character. No matter how compelling it is, it starts feeling pretty monotonous.

I think the longer a sitcom is on the air, by necessity, the dumber the characters have to get: otherwise, they would be learning and growing, and they won't be funny, so they have to get more and more extremely whatever they are.

Characters can become boring. That's what's tricky about television. It goes on and on - you're playing this same character for five seasons and it gets easy to fall into just walking on the set and assuming you know how to play a scene.

As time goes on, at both DC and Marvel, characters notch up so many victories that we often start to think of them as infallible, which is kind of death for adventure fiction.

First time I ever played a bad guy. I didn't want to do it. I got stuck in bad guys for 13 years after that.

The characters are not allowed to change if you write a sitcom; they're not allowed to learn anything. There's all these sorts of rules, and you go, 'I just want to be able to write one character and then leave that behind.' Also, as a performer, and I may regret saying this, but it would be my own personal hell to be trapped in the sitcom.

TV is designed to keep characters in place for years on end. The best example is 'M*A*S*H:' You have a three-year police action in Korea, and they stretched that out to eleven seasons. It was a great show, but when you think about it, a weird unreality overtakes a television series. You see the actors age, and yet the characters don't.

It is hard as an actor when you are typecast at a really young age and come out of that pigeonhole thing.

It has to be really interesting for me to perform the same role for 365 days non-stop. It becomes taxing for an actor to perform the same character for 12 hours every day, and then, after a point, there's no growth.

Nobody wants to play - I've talked to Brent Spiner about this. You don't want to play a character indefinitely who's not supposed to age.

Usually when you have a sequel, the character always stays the same and that's true basically of 'Rocky III,' 'IV' and 'V.' He didn't really change.

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

It's a difficult thing as an actor not to repeat one's self.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

The characters are that vague TV high school age, but they'll be in high school as long as we need them to be.

As an actor, there's nothing worse than the sound of 'seven years'. I'm sure to some people it sounds amazing, but to us, it's, like, seven years of playing the same person.

If you end up growing a character too quickly, you don't have anywhere to go after that point.

When you're playing the same character for a decade it's natural that there are moments when you want to try something new.

The reason I like 'Breaking Bad,' which is still probably my favorite show, is Walter White. You watch him transform, and that's so fascinating. And I think. a lot of TV shows that aren't successful, it's because the characters become stagnant.

I don't want to repeat myself. I'm not going to play a guy like Allen in Happiness again any time soon because I did that and I don't want to tarnish or dilute that film by doing it again, maybe less well.

I don't want to do the nerdy, goofy guy again. That was really fitting for the 'Napoleon' world, but that's kind of where I want it to stay.