Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Being a professional musician doesn't mean you spend 12 hours a day playing music. It means you spend up to 12 hours a day taking care of business, dealing with litigation, with the various characters who've stolen your interests, or fending off hostile lawsuits from former members of the band.
When I wrote 'East,' I wanted a completely earthy, very sexy, very violent play, so I wrote in verse. I found it not only satisfying but releasing. It gave me an opportunity to play with language. We never played the characters like the yobs that they are, but rather in a slightly heightened way.
People of African descent, most of us grew up accepting and loving Spider-Man. I still love Spider-Man. I still love the Incredible Hulk. I still have those characters that were white role models, superheroes, heroes - whatever you want to call it. You basically had no choice but to accept those.
I'm a good son, a good father, a good husband - I've been married to the same woman for 30 years. I'm a good friend. I finished college, I have my education, I donate money anonymously. So when people criticize the kind of characters that I play on screen, I go, 'You know, that's part of history.'
'Masaan' was a small role, but people connected with it. I loved playing a man who does not have many complexities in life. I was inspired by my father for this role. You find such characters in novel or in stories. You don't find such parts in movies where characters are either good, bad, or grey.
'Fast Times At Ridgemont High' is one of my favorite movies; it's a film that's a human comedy, it's a drama, and the characters all, in a way, fit the teenage archetypes, but they don't become stereotypes because each of the actors brought their own presence and their own personality to the screen.
The shows which have strong female characters are long overdue. I think there should be more and I am glad to see that there are more. There are fantastic female and diverse actors all around the world. I am glad to see that they are getting more recognition and being pushed into light more and more.
Lucifer likes to have fun, but we need to make sure that he's also rooted in a proper journey. For the first few episodes after a pilot, you're just trying to establish your world and the starting points for your characters. But I feel like, as the stakes went up, the 'Lucifer' veneer got less and less.
Everyone that's ever seen 'Pose' who isn't trans or doesn't have any connection to the LGBTQ community has been given the opportunity to create empathetic relationships to the characters that they would not have otherwise been able to. That's super essential in helping counter homophobia and transphobia.
I wake up and play a different person every day. Playing all these different characters and trying to figure out who your true authentic self is at the core of that as you're playing all these different roles, and man, that self-awareness starts to come into effect. And you start to see who you really are.
Jim Henson once allowed me to visit the Muppets on set and spent an entire day showing me how he and the other puppeteers performed Kermit and all the characters! After that, I was lucky enough to work with both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg on many fun animation projects and learned so much from them.
The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.
As an actor, you have to face the public all the time. It is a job that people fantasies, but it also creates prejudices; these prejudices are the scariest things. People judge a personal life or your image, and it can affect the characters I play. Therefore, I try not to showcase my personal life too much.
I like video games, but they are very violent. I want to create a video game in which you have to help all the characters who have died in the other games. 'Hey, man, what are you playing?' 'Super Busy Hospital. Could you leave me alone? I'm performing surgery! This guy got shot in the head, like, 27 times!'
I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.
I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.
I think making a great action movie is one of the hardest cinematic endeavors. By definition, smart characters avoid action. Smart people don't go down dark alleys, but if you're making an action movie and you want to have an action sequence, somehow you have to get that character into that dangerous situation.
I went to drama school in England, and you spend your first year working on the muscles surrounding the vocal mechanisms. You learn how you support it and create characters through your voice so that became an obsession. So I went to Hollywood thinking, 'Oh, I'm going to be one of the great voice-over artists.'
The 'Doom' thing is to be able to come at things with a different point of view. I decided the mask would just add to the mystique of the character as well as make Doom stand out. I though it'd be an easy way for people to see and differentiate between characters, sorta like when an actor gains weight for a role.
That's the beauty of the acting world. You can play so many different characters who know and do so many things that you have no idea about as yourself. So I'm a big fan of workshops and classes and learning new things because you can always apply it. It's your little supply bag of creativity. Keep filling it up.
Thanos is undoubtedly the most powerful entity and villain the world has ever seen - he is virtually indestructible. Imagine a villain so menacing that all the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and their allies have to come together in a hope to defeat this one guy; such characters come to you once in a lifetime!
I always go back to how people behave. If you watch how people actually behave in a situation, it's very simple and honest and contained. You don't need to use as much expression, as much feeling. Some characters will boil over, and that's another thing, but a lot of times I think you can just do very, very little.
It's very important for feminism for us to tell our daughters that they should be strong. But to tell our sons that they can be vulnerable, to have these characters on screen that are not perfectly masculine cowboys that never fail, for our boys to change their psyche as well, that's equally important for feminism.
The characters I've played as an actress have been really challenging and emotionally rewarding, but there was just something missing. I was finding over and over again that directors were looking to me to help with troubles on set as far as characters' relationships, special effects and story points were concerned.
'Meek's Cutoff' by Kelly Reichardt - it's beautifully shot. It's a complex story. The filmmaker gave a very patient and feminine touch to a story that takes place during a period of history that's very masculine, without losing any of the unforgiving harshness of the reality where the characters found themselves in.
When you're writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children's books.
I just had the absolute best luck in the world in terms of meeting The Young Bucks, and they might look like wild little rock stars who are irresponsible, but they are business geniuses. They set up the deal with Hot Topic, and they're going to be the first 7-figure downside characters that New Japan Pro Wrestling has.
If there is a reason I'm able to make unsympathetic characters human, it's because it's my desire to find what drives the unsympathetic behavior. Almost always at the bottom of it is some deep insecurity. Putting your finger on what each individual's particular insecurity is goes a long way to fleshing that person out.
Comics have a problem, and that is continuity - the obsession with placing the characters in an existing world, where every event is marked in canon. You're supposed to believe that these weepy star boys of now are the same gung-ho super teens fighting space monsters in the '60s, and they've only aged perhaps five years.
I think 'G.I. Joe' is a perfect example of how I'm the world's worst businessman. If I were smart, I'd be writing 'World War Z Part 12', but I have to go where the muse leads, and I've always been a huge 'G.I. Joe' fan. I always wanted to know more about these characters, these little plastic figures I played with as a kid.
John Wells and Christopher Chulack were pretty honest from the get-go in our first meeting about 'Southland.' They were looking to create characters that were believable in the environment of the LAPD - multi-dimensional, layered characters with real flaws; good-hearted cops mixed with the perfect amount of heroism and irony.
But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.
I do mourn my characters. I wrote an essay once where I was sure that far back in a marsh there was a hummock - a little hill of hardwoods - and an old farm house, where all the heroines in my novels lived together with all my beloved dead dogs. I've discussed this with my therapist, naturally. He says it's okay in fair amounts.
Performing comedy in San Francisco to begin with is pretty wild. You've got to - you've got the human game preserve to play off of. And it's a lot of great characters everywhere. You work off that, and then you play the rooms, and eventually you get to a point where you're playing a club that is a comedy club, with other comics.
'Lonesome Dove' was the movie. I watched that over and over and over again, and I know every line. It was one that I loved as a kid for all the horses and characters that went over my head, but then the older I got, I realized how amazing it was on so many other different levels - Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones' relationship.
We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them. For much of the rest of the world we must be the focus of bitter amusement, characters in a satire we don't understand. It is British people that don't learn languages, or British history. Britain is the true scrounger, the true criminal.
The way Disney characters move, they're very kind of slow and fluid and flowing; one pose kind of eases into the next. If you look at a show like 'The Simpsons' and subsequently a show like 'Family Guy' - the characters will jerk from pose to pose a lot, a bit more snappy. Which sort of goes along with the writing tone of the show.
The challenge in writing a show that's about people and their flaws is that it can easily tip over - okay, I'll sometimes watch something, and there will be characters that are written in a way that I'll know that the writer just hates human beings. They're expressing this misanthropic point of view with these detestable characters.
We are all different human beings, and we all have different backgrounds, and we stem from different social strata. That is what defines how you hear people talk, how you want to quote them when you speak. We all have different fears and doubts and complexes and this is what shapes the way we see other people. Especially characters.
The black characters on TV are the sidekicks, or they're insignificant. You could put all the black sidekicks on one show, and it would be the most boring, one-dimensional show ever. Even look at the black women on 'Community' and 'Parks and Recreation' - they are the archetype of the large black women on television. Snide and sassy.
In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.
One of the things that's important for anybody adapting source material that is primarily a male buddy picture is to find ways to latch on to strong female characters in the piece and bring them to the forefront and celebrate their point of view alongside the men; otherwise, it becomes a sausage party, and it's a singular point of view.
Usually, in theatre, you're adapting existing material or creating an entirely new play. With the 'Cursed Child,' we have been given the unique opportunity to explore some of the most cherished books and beloved characters ever written, yet work with J. K. Rowling to tell a story from that world that no one yet knows - it's exhilarating.