Humanizing Characters Quotes

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

August [Wilson] elevates in us is the average man in a way that is heroic and real and human. What you do is you sit with our pathology, you invest in our humanity. We're not walking around like walking symbols like we mean something larger. We're just moving throughout our lives and that's the power of the piece. That's revolutionary.

I don't think I can play a role without falling in love with something about her; even the most despicable people who I have portrayed had some aspect of them which I found beautiful.

The only thing that I know how to do as an actor, as a trained actor, is you can't villainize the character you're playing. Whether it's a fictional character or a real character. Because then you operate from that sort of negative point of view, and you can't humanize him.

I don't have any special approach for playing dark characters. That's because I never looked at them as dark characters per se. For me, they were real people.

For me, 'Mommy' was about developing very humane characters that would be very credible and endearing and work onscreen.

You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people.

Now we really like to put people in boxes. As men, we do it because we don't understand characters that aren't ourselves and we aren't willing to put ourselves in the skin of those characters and women, I think, terrify us. We tend not to write women as human beings. It's cartoons we're making now. And that's a shame.

The work evolves when you get another part, and then you're getting called on to solve difficult characters, to inject a note of humanity into them. It's more interesting for me to do that than to stand around and be sunny.

If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader.

Trying to find a human side to the character is a way to give them a chance to have people like them.

The important thing is for the characters to feel real, and to be given the humanity they are due. That granting of humanity is what separates a full portrait from a stereotype.

If you go into something saying, 'I'm the bad guy,' you do yourself a disservice as an actor. It's always about trying to find the humanity in a character.

I'd like to think that what my style of writing is, is an attempt not so much to judge the characters that I'm writing about, to expose them, to label them, to stereotype them, but instead to make them come alive for the reader with all their strengths and their flaws intact.

Even if the character is something that seems ridiculous on paper, there's a human element to everything. Otherwise, we don't connect with it.

If there is a reason I'm able to make unsympathetic characters human, it's because it's my desire to find what drives the unsympathetic behavior. Almost always at the bottom of it is some deep insecurity. Putting your finger on what each individual's particular insecurity is goes a long way to fleshing that person out.

I can't always pick and choose, but I try very hard to take the roles where they are a bit more human. Sometimes there's a hilarious thing that comes along and it might not be the most interesting character, but I'm just delighted to be able to do something.

I try to find something in everyone that I play - even the most heinous ones. You have to find something that is real and vulnerable about everything that you play.

You play the honesty of the characters and show a side of them that people can relate to and want to get to know.