Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
That's a very complicated issue [with Donal Trump supporters]. There's things going on with people that we're not privy to, we don't understand. These aren't just a bunch of bad people. That isn't how it works.
It's always more interesting to play the villain.
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.
The idea that people do very bad things for sometimes very good reasons, feels reasons.
The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread."
My reasons for coming to get married in Calcutta are complicated, and it's very hard to put it into a sentence. People ask me why. To me, it just felt like a very natural and exciting decision.
In our road through life we may happen to meet with a man casting a stone reverentially to enlarge the cairn of another which stone he has carried in his bosom to sling against that very other's head.
I don't play the role of a villain, really, but I like playing anti-hero kind of roles. I like characters where there's conflict, drama, and more personal investment than just being heroes.
I'm such an admirer, I am an admirer of villains, especially working with so many great ones.
It's more fun to write villains. They are more of a challenge, and I get a sick kind of pleasure out of delving into their minds. There's rarely emptiness, and there is almost always deep intelligence.
Each of the actors need to have their justification for saying something awful. You want everyone to have a positive and negative thing. Even a positive thing needs to have darkness in it. It needs to have depth.
But most dragons seem to have interesting personalities--besides probably having quite good reasons for what they do, if only one could understand them
