Character Quotes - Page 391

When you look at "American Crime" and you have the character Terri LaCroix is a pharmaceutical executive - why does that character always have to be white?

I can work inside the boundaries of Erika Murphy, or whoever the character is. It's fun to create somebody that's not you, that doesn't exist.

I'm just really thankful to have the chance to portray a character you don't see every day.

I create my own backstory regardless of if I'm told something about the background or not. There's always more that you can develop in your head that makes a character more layered, more honest.

Too often, we get attention and sympathy by being a victim. If we're invested in someone being our villain, we must love being the victim. We have to let go of both characters in the story.

I was debating whether to do Legally Blonde, and I saw this interview with Gloria Steinem about how important Goldie Hawn's role in Private Benjamin was for women; by the end of the movie, the character socked her fiancé in the face at the altar because he didn't understand who she'd become through her journey. I was like, "I feel like Gloria Steinem told me to do Legally Blonde. That's how Elle Woods is too!"

The more I know about America, the better I'll be at performing American characters and American stories.

I come to writing from hearing great stories as a child in Louisiana, where the mark of a person was his or her ability to be a raconteur. I also come to writing as a professional actress whose body has been trained to listen and smell and inhabit characters without judgment.

Every work coming from the creator is about getting the demons out, and each character in those stories had a different personal crisis to get through.

The danger with playing someone tough is that the character can become two-dimensional and mean and nobody likes her.

When I first got the job, I was told nothing about my character. She's an anthropologist and she's tough, she's a female Indiana Jones. That's what I went into [Lost] knowing.

I suppose the reason why I like acting is because I'm curious about human nature, and the less I know about a character on the page, instinctively, in a way, the better.

Sometimes you can incubate a character and that can take me a month just sitting on it imagining it, doing everything from sketching it to taking long walks, but sometimes you can see the character immediately. A lot of it is instinctive.

You don't get roles like leading character in 'Christine' very often because people don't really like women on film to be unlikable. I think Christine is lovable, but I don't think she's likable. I think there's a fundamental difference. For me, those are the richest ones. Men have had a career of doing those kind of things.

I always look for contradiction in a character.

The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.

I don't only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are.

Interference is a terrific page-turner, but it's also a haunting, powerful look at the way families and friendships entangle us all. Berry is a sharp-eyed, engaging writer, and she deftly captures the terrors, ruptures and intimacies of one seemingly ordinary neighborhood, always finding a precarious beauty in her characters' lives. This is a book that is terrifying, startling, and very hard to put down.

When complicated characters aren't well drawn, they're boring.

The Sun had a good relationship with Frank Bruno. We did lots of interviews. He was a great character, very friendly to the media.

I enjoy creating and developing characters, as well as situations. But I have always had more ideas than I can ever put down on paper and fantasy allows me to include a lot of what I feel.

I love the chameleon nature of this business [acting]. I always have. Sometimes I'm not as recognizable as somebody else and I may not have gotten a role, but for me, acting is not a competition. I've just kept my head down and kept working, and had the great pleasure of working with some amazing people and playing some extraordinary and extreme characters.

Hence the genius of having Ken steer this ship as well. You have to invest these characters with a Shakespearian quality and not in a way that might disengage the audience but in a way that actually lets you play to an audience.

When you're wearing jeans there's a shift in your center of gravity. A costume like this and a character like this, there's no way to hide. If you try and play him any way sort of modern or normal, you diminish. He's larger than life. He's 150 percent. You've got to go for it all the time. It was just impossible.

It's all about the integrity of their characters. They [Marvel] care so much about the loyalty and integrity of each and every character and all of their stories. They trust and love their readership. They're the ones who have invested in these stories.