Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You're a hero one day, you're a villain another day. They say that's football. When a manager does well, they're applauded, when they don't do well, they get the sack. Football is a tough world. Those who watch enjoy it - for everybody else, there are a lot of challenges.
I have been fortunate to get different types of work, but by and large till 90s for actors like me there were not many opportunities besides playing brother of the heroine or friend of the hero or young college villain after the earlier new wave was consumed by television.
I try to do different things. My main goal is to choose roles where I won't repeat myself or where I will not be doing the same role over and over. I try to do a villain, the best friend to the lead, and then a lead. I try to vary it up because if I don't, I will get bored.
It is an Englishman who turns out to be the real villain of 'The Moonstone.' By contrast, the three Indian priests who dedicate their lives to returning the jewel to its proper home in the temple, though they have nothing personal to gain by doing so, are positively heroic.
I have been doing a lot of romantic movies, so such roles don't excite me much now. I would like to play an out-and-out, really cruel villain once. My character in 'Da Thadiya' had such a streak, but I want a full length villainous role. It is a different kind of excitement.
It's about the characters, it's about the film, it's about the process of making stunning visuals and a huge, epic movie. It doesn't matter if my head was covered in a black plastic bag and I was bouncing around in a space hopper: That's the villain of Chris Nolan's 'Batman!'
I like ambiguity because you may be the villain in someone else's story and the hero in your own, and I think very often, African-American characters are either one thing or the other. You shouldn't have to be perfectly good or perfectly bad. You don't even have to be magical.
In the early days, Jerry was an antagonist, which was arguably his best casting. 'The King's' quick wit is perfectly suited to be an antagonist, but at the same time, he's so funny that it is hard to hate Jerry Lawler as the villain - especially at this stage of his long career.
Operas elucidate, in a way sometimes absent in other theatrical productions, the very human fact that in every hero, there is a thread of duplicity. In every villain, there is another side to consider: We don't have to like him or her, but we are compelled to think about motivation.
A lot of actors would tell you that they'd rather play the villain than the hero. When you're the character, there are no repercussions. So there is a kind of liberating feeling about saying certain things to certain people - and I think that it's always quite satisfying to do that.
With all due respect to the other writers, I don't want to disparage any other writers; I don't want to have to invent a bigger villain than Deathstroke so Deathstroke can seem heroic fighting this bigger villain. I'd rather just have Deathstroke be who is, and he's kind of a bastard.
There's not one part of me that wants to go crazy and do anything out of the ordinary, but it would be nice to do something and not have it spread all over the place. But that's the world we live in now, and you either have to accept it or figure it out - or become a villain, I guess.
Of course, 'The Last Stand' has a villain who is traveling to the border to fulfill his own desires, but it's more about the main character. The Sheriff putting a stop to this villain and defending his town. 'The Last Stand' is more about protecting something. About protecting a value.
Some of us are born rebellious. Like Jean Genet or Arthur Rimbaud, I roam these mean streets like a villain, a vagabond, an outcast, scavenging for the scraps that may perchance plummet off humanity's dirty plates, though often sometimes taking a cab to a restaurant is more convenient.
I think you have a social responsibility as the villain, which is pretty different from the hero's responsibility. If you have any kind of a social or political conscience at all, the first thing you want to do is make malevolence recognizable to people, almost as a kind of teaching aid.
To be completely honest, it's shocking to me that I keep getting the villain roles! I do not see myself as the villain and I know, growing up, I was the opposite of a villain. I would never try to be a villain to anyone - but maybe other people I grew up with feel differently about that.
'Deathstroke' became an interesting challenge - not just because of his ethnicity, but because he's a villain. I've never written a villain as a protagonist of a series before. I thought this could be an interesting challenge. That's really what got my attention, and it just went from there.
A lot of the time, a moral compass is all that separates a hero from being a villain; otherwise, the two are very much the same. Both are generally the richest and most complex characters, and they get to have all the fun. I guess it's those types of roles that I ultimately gravitate towards.
I wrote this 12-page 'Luke Cage' comic book for Marvel once, and I got to create a villain. His name was Lone Shark, so there was this running thing of whether it was spelled L-O-A-N or L-O-N-E. I like the idea of 'I'm a lone shark,' and then people are like, 'You are here to collect a debt?'
The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren't a lot of guys in England for me to look up to.
When I was a child I liked watching shows about bounty hunters and Canadian Mounties. I liked the 'Lone Ranger,' I liked shows where the guy saved the girl from the villain. I just liked those kinds of things and I wanted to be a guy like that, you know, that would save the damsel in distress.
I would love to play a villain someday in that I think that what I've done with my whole career is walk this tightrope between charming and creepy, and I always fall on the charming side. I'd like to fall on the creepy side and be like one of those scary old men, like really charming villains.
To become a villain, you had to have become disillusioned, and in order to become disillusioned you had to have been passionate about something you believed in that was shaken and ripped from your grasp as a protagonist in that stage of your life, leaving you disillusioned with God, if you will.
I love to play with the notion of who the protagonist is - who is the audience supposed to root for? I did it in 'Sicario' and feel it was the strength of the script - guiding the audience's allegiance toward the villain because they think he's the hero, until it's revealed that he's the villain.
Well, this is an unfortunate part of the UN institution. It's the - the theater of the absurd. It doesn't only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi's Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights; Saddam's Iraq headed the UN Committee on Disarmament.
If you are Black or Brown, or a liberal or immigrant or Democrat, or a woman unwilling to quietly submit, then Ailes was the ultimate villain. You were the object of mockery and scorn - sometimes overt, often subtle. You were the thing to be gawked at, pawed at, jeered at, propositioned or feared.
I think what's exciting about playing a villain - particularly a villain who's totally unapologetic about their evil intentions - is that it's not anything remotely like what you get to do in real life. You're never allowed to be evil and not feel bad about it afterwards, let alone be evil, period.
A good villain exudes charisma and power. He has principles, though; that just gives him a level of dimension. It makes him seem to be a bit unpredictable, because he's usually deemed as some type of evil, ruthless person, and then he shows you his principles, and you don't know what to think of it.
So once I thought of the villain with a sense of humor, I began to think of a name and the name "the Joker" immediately came to mind. There was the association with the Joker in the deck of cards, and I probably yelled literally, 'Eureka!' because I knew I had the name and the image at the same time.
I don't want to paint myself as some villain - I was never a bad guy doing horrible things, but I got too caught up in wanting a very specific thing to happen to the band. Ultimately, I had to find the ability in myself to get over that and stop being so stringent and learn to laugh a little bit more.
Harvard was also a little bit of a villain in my first book, 'The Dante Club.' I guess there might be a way to make Harvard more of a sympathetic presence, but it's such a powerful institution that it more naturally lends itself toward not necessarily a negative but an obstructionist element in a story.
If someone really takes a risk, it doesn't get dismissed. That's what happened when the Oscar was won posthumously by Heath Ledger, who did one of the definitive villain performances of all time. But it really has to be exceptional in defining everything we previously knew about the actress or the actor.
I am not somebody who goes around saying men are superior or that male writers are superior. In fact, I really go out of my way to champion women's work that I think is not getting enough attention. None of that is ever enough. Because a villain is needed. It's like there's no way to make myself not male.
People are much more complicated in real life, but my characters are as subtle and nuanced as I can make them. But if you say my characters are too black and white, you've missed the point. Villains are meant to be black-hearted in popular novels. If you say I have a grey-hearted villain, then I've failed.
As a kid, you either wanted to play Bond or a Bond villain. Ask any of my friends in entertainment, whether they are actors or writers or producers or directors, and they will tell you that they'd love to play a Bond baddie. I can go anywhere in the world and I am known; it put me on the international map.
America has this fascination with glorifying the villain and not talking about the trials and tribulations. We tell the story of the successful villain a lot of times, but we don't tell the story of the people who don't come out so successful, and we don't tell the story of all the bystanders of that choice.
There's a million and one things an actor can do with a villain. He can go for all kinds of quirks and tricks. The hero is much harder to define for an actor. When you play a straight role or a hero, you're kind of stuck, It's much more difficult to give a good guy interesting qualities or to make him unusual.
Well, you know, in any novel you would hope that the hero has someone to push back against, and villains - I find the most interesting villains those who do the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. Either one is interesting. I love the gray area between right and wrong.
There's the 7-year-old me that pretended to be Wonder Woman running around the schoolyard. Like, what an incredible thing to imagine that when the bully shows up or the villain, you would be strong enough to do something about it. But, also, you look like Lynda Carter while you're doing it - like, 'Oh, my God.'
So, I'm thinking of a name for a villain that has a sense of humor. I thought of 'The Joker' as a name, and as soon as I thought that, I associate it with the playing card, as my family had a tradition of champion playing; my brother was a contract champion bridge player. There were always cards around the house.
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!
As you do on any cable series, if they introduce you as the villain, then you better start working towards making him a really good guy, or if they introduce you as a really good guy, then you better start working towards being the villain. Your character has to go somewhere, or else they become very uninteresting.
No ideology better understands the need for enemies than neoconservatism, and when the cold war dramatically and unexpectedly ended, the way was prepared for the 'Arab threat' to emerge. 'True Lies,' the 1994 James Cameron comedy thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, duly served up the Arab villain Salim Abu Aziz.
I think it's too easy often to find a villain out of the headlines and to then repeat that villainy again and again and again. You know, traditionally, America has always looked to scapegoat someone as the boogie man... there is a tradition in the most simplistic of action movies for there to be some horrible villain.
I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.
We spend all this energy keeping our lives normal and safe and predictable, and the result is that our approved cultural safety valve is the movies. So in films, anyway, the hero is obliged to represent the continuance of social values and institutions, and his permission to act is much more seriously limited than the villain's.
I'd love to play a Bond villain. Yeah, I'd love to play a Bond villain. Everyone always says this to me; they always say, 'You've got to be a Bond villain', 'We're going to make you a Bond villain...' But they've never, ever approached me, I've never had a whiff of it. I think I'd love to play a Bond villain; I'd have great fun.
It was Sultan Qureshi, the character of 'Gangs of Wasseypur,' which brought success as a baddie, but it were the TC and teacher's roles in 'Masaan' and 'Nil Battey Sannata' that broke the villain's mould and helped me successfully explore the other shades - be it comedy, intense, or serious - surprising the audience all the time.
After my wife and I were married, we obtained a rescue dog from a family that didn't want her anymore. She was a beautiful Collie/Shepherd mix named 'Precious.' It then came to pass that our first marital 'debate' was whether we should change the dog's name away from the same name used by the wacky villain in 'Silence of the Lambs.'
The villain is usually the most interesting part. But it has to be a smart thing. Just dumb cliche villains with a Russian accent and big muscles and a mean face, I don't know. My Russian accent isn't that great, and the muscles aren't that big and the mean face is not enough. You know what I mean? It gets very boring. Tedious stuff.