The lead character in 'Adaptation' is pretty much me but with more talent. Every time I watch 'Adaptation,' I feel very emotional because it makes me be kinder to myself and see the human situation a little more clearly.
My basic mistake in 'The World's Greatest Lover' was that I made the leading character a neurotic kook and sent him to Hollywood. I should have made him a perfectly normal, sane, ordinary person, and sent him to Hollywood. The audience identifies with the lead character.
I've read crime fiction all my life. A thing that's bothered me about crime fiction is that it's generally about one or two people, but there's not much about society. I want to get away from that particular pattern: a lead, a supporting role and backdrop characters.
If I had, say, a tall, amateur male lead living on the campus of a rural college (Six Years), the next book might feature a short, cop who lives in the heart of Manhattan (Missing You).
I guess it's a kind of a goal for any actor to be the lead of a movie. Not for ego reasons, but because it is creatively the biggest challenge.
I am capable of holding the quote-unquote 'title' of leading man. Leading man just means people want to see you and assume that you can hold a film, carry a movie.
As an actor, it's great to play a strong leader with a heart of gold.
In the 1980s, there was no category to stick me in. 'He sounds too smart' is what I was hearing. I realized that I had to become a member of the school of what I call 'ugly acting.' Which meant I wanted to do what Dustin Hoffman did very successfully: to play character roles, but lead character roles.
One of my favourite films is called 'Lacombe Lucien,' directed by Louis Malle. The lead character in that film, like the lead characters in many '70s and '80s films, has a moral ambiguity to him.
Sometimes I take a movie selfishly because it's a female lead.
It doesn't matter if your lead character is good or bad. He just has to be interesting, and he has to be good at what he does.
The lead character in 'Yennai Arindhaal' is like an extension of the protagonists of 'Kaakha Kaakha' and 'Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu.'
I'm kind of at the mercy of writers out there. I need a writer out there who wants to write a vehicle for me. Do it and get it to me immediately. I do want to be a lead. I want to play a lead role in a movie.
If mutual fund directors are independent, then I'm the lead character in the Bolshoi Ballet.
I've had male executives say that my lead character was unlikable because she slept with a lot of guys.
Let's put it this way, when I was casting, I cast Viggo first and then found someone who could play his wife, rather than the other way around. So for me he's still the lead character.
I did a play called 'Disgraced' in 2012 at Lincoln Center, which ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize. I played the lead character, a Muslim American, who had renounced Islam and became very anti-Islam.
I think that 'Saving Grace' is pretty funny. I think that the show and the woman have a pretty great sense of humor.
The media has gone through lots of things that make it a less foreign thing to have your lead character be gay.
I don't really think of Odo as a heroic lead, but that's nice if you do.
It seemed to me... that the only valid people to deal with crime were cops, and I would like to make the lead character, rather than a single person, a squad of cops.
There are writers out there who say they're writing a second series, and then you pick it up and it feels exactly the same, only the lead character is blonde instead of brunette.
Actually, after three years, I realised that the opening scenes of 'Polladhavan' were inspired by 'Lolita,' in which the lead character says, 'Why did I meet her? My life would have been different had I not met her.'
I didn't think I'd be getting my own stand-alone film.
You need to learn that, unless your lead character is written in a way that one of the 20 movie stars want to play him, your movie will not get made.
