Humanizing Villains Quotes

I never try and play a bad guy to be bad and to be brutal and to be nasty and vicious, because I think you're going to be very cliche there. You know, you've got to find the truth in that character and what he believes in. It just happens that, you know, he's wrong.

It's the challenge of trying to evoke any kind of sympathy for a role that ordinarily we would say, "Oh, this is a bad guy" and dismiss him.

I've played an awful lot of people that other people would call villains, but that isn't a very helpful attitude to have if you're about to play them. They are just people, and they may do dreadful things and say dreadful things, but your job as an actor is to know why they do them or say them.

Well, on a personal level, I would never want to take on a character who didn’t have some redeemable qualities. Even the worst of people, such as Michael Scott in The Office [Carell’s character in the US version of the Ricky Gervais sitcom], have some decent human qualities that you can latch onto.

I don't do villains often enough. There are two approaches: give them sympathetic, reasonable motivations for doing the most unspeakable things, or get inside heads that are interestingly broken.

At the end of the day, what I try to bring to villainous characters is a sense of humanity.

Portraying as human the people you hear about on the news doing bad things is dangerous. But it's also necessary and important.

I have a knack of making villainous people a little bit sympathetic, a bit of fun on screen.

You never want to play too vampiric or generically evil, so you look for emotions or character traits that you can relate to.

Making 'bad people' seem human is the key to making them really scary.