It's a beautiful aspect of narrative construction, hunting for the right images and metaphors to render our character's hearts/minds/souls as though they're ecosystems, full-fledged settings for a reader to inhabit like a place.
The first thing I do when I read a part is see if I can identify emotionally with a character. If I make that connection, everything else is just working on knowing their life circumstances and manifesting those through practice and research.
A defining reality for me is what Scripture teaches in Hebrews 12, that God is our father, and that a sign that he loves us is that he disciplines us, he takes us through hardship to build character in us that could not be shaped apart from difficulty.
Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it's about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have became estrangedmemory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.
I'm being provided with some emotional ballast by giving me an intimate portrait of one character in particular in contrast to the collective. I'm fortunate that I had very sympathetic readers, but ordinarily - if a book makes you laugh too much, it shifts from "literature" to "entertainment."
The whole time I was writing, I had to fight my normal inclination to be funny, to sort of patch humor in, in order to convey all of the disruptions of the disease to the family dynamic, the loss of individuality, the impact on professional life, and the sanity of the main character. Of course, that's not to say it never sneaks in; there's some black comedy in there, like when he shows up to court wearing a bicycle helmet and won't take it off.
Sometimes you have to make decisions that necessarily exclude the collective. It's more difficult to be a friend - even though they know each other and they treat each other like friends, it's more of a challenge for them. It's just institutional fact; the two characters that are the most aloof are the ones who have the most responsibility.
Names generate meaning in a short amount of space — they provoke thoughts, questions. That's something I like doing. Of course, you have to be careful. Sometimes it can alienate the reader, it can be another level of mediation, to make a character carry the great burden of a metaphoric name. The character can be a device before he or she becomes a person, and that can be a bad thing for a writer who wants to offer up a kind of emotional proximity in the work. It's a constant struggle, the desire to be playful and the desire to communicate on some very stark emotional level.
We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.
I love the phrase, 'Somebody's going to have a good day today, so it might as well be me.' I feel like you bring everything to the character, I hope.
Everything can inspire me. I know that sounds like a cop-out answer, but I find inspiration in literally just about everything. As an actor, I have to watch people and observe their behaviors - this is how I create characters. My daily surroundings feed my work, whether it's something I'm working on right now or it's something down the road. Music, art, landscape - these are all things I draw inspiration from.
As an actor, I have to watch people and observe their behaviors - this is how I create characters.
I'll look at the script and I'll try to find as many books, movies, and pieces of music that I think are going to feed each scene or the character as a whole
I think I've spent so much time playing characters that are so far away from me and learning how to technically build and how to technically put something on top of you.
The most important thing to having a long career, as an actor, is diversity and being able to play different types of characters in different types of movies. I want to keep acting, all my life. In order to do that, I think it is important to go and do the bigger tentpole box office movies, and then also do more character roles.
I love doing roles and movies that are different from each other. That's kind of why I like to be an actor because I get to play different characters and pretend I'm different people going through different situations.
I base the roles I choose depending on the characters. That's just how I'm gonna run my career. So if it's a good role I'm gonna take it whether it be fantasy, or whether it be realistic or fiction, anything.
What I think after reading the script and seeing where the story goes, I go with my instincts on the character. If my instincts are wrong the director and the producers will guide me in the right direction. That's just kind of how I take on any role, be it a fantasy movie or not.
The Hunger Games' for me is I love the books so much and the character and the story were incredible. That's kind of the game plan is just do really interesting stories with interesting characters.
When you get to play a character that's in love, it's cool.
I've been on projects before where there's no rehearsal, and you walk in on set and that's literally the first time you've ever played the character, and then I've had times where there's been three weeks of rehearsal. I like both.
There are a lot of characters that you can get into that don't exist in the studio world.
When you get to play a character that's in love, it's cool. Once you have love as a motivator in a story, your character is free to do anything.
I'm always open to not necessarily to do leading roles because I want to do roles that are the best, character role. And sometimes, it's not going to be a leading role. It's going to be a smaller, supporting role. So really, I'm open to doing anything.
I'm a huge Kentucky fan. So when there was a chance to do the John Wall dance, I went into character.
