Villain Motivation Quotes

I think Shakespeare really got it. He was the first one to introduce psychology to villains and give them a real point of view.

No actor can play a villain if they don't sympathise with him or her - otherwise the character just becomes a two-dimensional caricature.

A lot of actors say that no villain wants to be a villain, generally. They don't might being evil, maybe, but they have an agenda that they can justify. Otherwise, a little bit of that tension goes, if you're just a villain and everyone hates you because you're mean.

In the best works of fiction, there's no mustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy's got his reasons.

We want our villains and antagonists to have distinct motivations.

You need to try to find a way to humanize your villains. Genuine villains, in real life, still have mothers and daughters and sisters, and they fall in love. They don't walk around with a big sign saying, "Bad guy," on their head. They think they're good guys. If you can play that, I think it makes it more interesting.

If it's a really well written villain, he probably has more layers than the archetypal good person. So that would be very attractive to an actor. No one chooses to be a villain; it's usually a reaction to something else.

The normal storyline of a horror film or a slasher film is the young, beautiful college folks go camping and get systematically killed by the person in a mask. So that's how it normally is.

I love Captain Cold. I have him on my door at the office. He's grounded; he doesn't want to rule the world. He's not necessarily driven by ego, which a lot of villains are.

I don't think you can play a villain with a negative point of view.

For me, especially with the villain, it's not very interesting to write a guy who is just 100% bad.

It's not that fun to just play a villain, without any reasoning behind it.

I think the days are over where we were okay with bad guys just doing the pirate laugh and eating kids just for fun. There has to be a goal, you know? They have to have a point, and they have to make sense.

The spy genre is something I loved.It also extends to the bad guy because I think, to me, what I love the most about the spy genre is when you have a great bad guy. What makes a great bad guy, to me, is the logic. What he's about has to make sense to me, that if I was in his shoes, yeah, right, that makes sense.