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The DC Universe has the best villains in fiction, right? I don't think there's any group of villains collectively or anywhere else that come close to DC's. Joker, Cat Woman, Lex Luthor, are all staples. A lot of the comic book icons are fiction icons.
'Forever Evil' is my love letter to DC super villains. It's my chance to take all of the villains I've worked with and all the ones I've never worked with and put them into one gigantic, epic story that will bring together the bads of the DC Universe.
I think all villains have something in common: they have something that they need or want very, very badly. The stakes are very high and they are not bound by moral codes or being ethical, so they can do anything and will do anything to get what they want.
I've got everything against likable characters. Likable characters are usually completely forgettable, and we don't really care. I think we love villains... precisely because they show us these disturbing complexities that I don't think nice characters do.
You can have villains like the Penguin, who strut around in a tuxedo with an umbrella, and Poison Ivy and all of the fantastic stuff she does, but unless there's a bit of a human in there, and unless there's a credible threat, then Batman himself doesn't work.
I look at some of the old villains in the Disney movies. If you really listen, you can hear some of the villains or some of the supporting characters, they use the voices over and over because they were so versatile in the way that they performed on voiceovers.
Heroes aren't supposed to do bad things. That's what villains are for. So either the good supersedes the bad, or the bad makes it impossible to remember the good. We don't like it when such duality exists in one person. We don't want to know our heroes are human.
One thing that's happened to me is I've been around a long time and I've played a lot of villains and so forth. I think it had to do with, well one thing is that I looked younger than I was for a long time. Now I think I'm suddenly starting to play people's father.
The truth is, the sexist behaviour that really holds women in games back doesn't come from the moustache-twirling cartoon villains of Gamergate. It's the sexist hiring practices of our journalistic institutions. It's the consistently over-sexualised designs we see.
Also, what I like about it is that the villains in 'Narcos' are not just only the drug dealers, but it also poses the question of what part does the government have in the problem, and the corruption in it? I think it's a very important question to ask as a society.
In movies, we've run out of ideas for bad guys. We end up with politically incorrect villains, like Arab terrorists or Latin drug dealers or corrupt politicians. Well, aliens are the best film villains since the Nazis. You don't have to worry about offending anyone.
I generally play villains once every three or four years by choice because I get offered villainous roles a lot, because of the way I look and whatever. And I tend to avoid them because I think you can end up in a cul-de-sac of your own making if you're cast in that.
I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic.
To me, the more interesting villains are the ones you can, in some sense, relate to or sympathize with at times. Maybe you sympathize with them one moment; the next moment, they do something truly atrocious, and you feel bad you ever sympathized with them in the first place.
The problem with the focus on speculators, as was demonstrated during the financial crisis, is that it tends to divert attention from the real villains. During the financial crisis, the villains were the actions of the banks, not the speculators betting on bank share prices.
Evil is relative - and what I mean by that is that our villains are as complex, as deep and as compelling as any of our heroes. Every antagonist in the DC Universe has a unique darkness, desire and drive. And the reason for being of 'Forever Evil' is to explore that darkness.
One of the things about having played a lot of villains is... I don't have the same experience of someone who maybe has been a leading man since they were 22 and therefore looks at certain things in a character to romanticize themselves. I actually very much embrace the bad stuff.
I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?
Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn't be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.
I am a method actor, but I'm also a film actor as well as a method actor. Characters that don't have humility, whether they are heroes or villains, are hard to relate to. All characters in every aspect of what we do should have humility. If they don't, then they're a cartoon character.
Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.
Why can't I ever play a nice, normal, salt-of-the-earth type? Is there something I should know? It's fun to play villains and character roles, of course - but I'm sure it's also fun to be a really big star and play the lead in everything, where all you have to do is show up and not blink.
Villains are always the best roles, but that meant that for months afterwards, all I got offered were absolute cads and bounders and really nasty pieces of work, as well as a lot of people who only had one arm. Such is the limited imaginative power, you see, of a great many casting directors.
A lot of times, female characters - particularly the villains - come off as very one-dimensional. They get the short shrift in that they're only given the snappy comeback, or they're relegated to a very stereotypical role. I want to know what's driving them - that's what's really interesting.
I have been thinking a lot about what we see in villains, how we relate to villains, and what it is about certain villains that we actually empathize with. Like Macbeth. We're not supposed to like a guy who kills the king and takes over, but there's something about him we're really fascinated by.
I had a sympathetic role in 'thirtysomething,' and in two weeks I'm going to do the role again. But in the movies, I just love the heavies. It's much more fun. Villains are a ball. People have been laughing at me for 50 years, so I love to sit in the back of the theater and listen to them hate me.
I'm not particularly fond of playing villains. I do want to be a working actor, and I've had to look at what was offered to me, what roles I could get, and what I could do with them. Even though I'm not drawn to putting those kinds of darker characters out there, I think it's an interesting challenge.
I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn't know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don't think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.
I really enjoy playing villains, whether they're realistic like Switchblade Sam or whether they're a bit more over-the-top like Kruge in 'Star Trek III' or Judge Doom in 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit.' It's sort of a license just to be as bad as the script allows you to be - you can just go for it and have fun.
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.
I was always fascinated by the Torah, the Bible, in terms of story telling: heroes and villains, morality and flaws. There's no better epic. Also, being part Latin and Jewish means I have a sense of the theatrical. There were always a lot of people in my house. My home was always filled with a lot of storytellers.
When you're writing for a game - even if you're using very well known characters like Batman and his villains who lend themselves to many different interpretations - you have to keep in mind that you're writing for a different medium. Things are a bit more straightforward than it is for a feature film or a TV show.
Debt, we've learned, is the match that lights the fire of every crisis. Every crisis has its own set of villains - pick your favorite: bankers, regulators, central bankers, politicians, overzealous consumers, credit rating agencies - but all require one similar ingredient to create a true crisis: too much leverage.
Before 9/11, I was playing a wide range of characters. I would play a lover, a cop, a father. As long as I could create the illusion of the character, the part was given to me. But after 9/11, something changed. We became the villains, the bad guys. I don't mind to play the bad guy as long as the bad guy has a base.
I've played a lot of villains. The villains are always fun because you can just go fractionally bigger than life. It's always a grey area because you don't want to end up mustache-twirling and making them a little false, but you always get to play a little more, whereas the lead guy has to be a little more straight.
It's true in the beginning I started playing villains, and I think that's pretty clear, because if you don't conventionally look a certain way and you've got a certain kind of presence when you're young, then what's available to you is character roles, and the best character roles when you're young tend to be villains.
I think you have to be crazy not to want to work on the Joker! I can't think of many characters, heroes or villains, that are as malleable as him. He really can be interpreted in so many different ways, and generally, people don't really want to scratch the surface because you can get into some really dark territory real fast.
The Model Sanctuary is not about self-indulgence - it's about reminding and allowing them to become self-sufficient human beings. I wanted to alert people to the fact that we're not the victims, but nor are we the villains. We want fair practice and positive, sustainable change, working with the fashion industry, not against it.
Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind. People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terrible things people do in terrible situations. Drama is failing if it doesn't do that.
When I decided to crop what was left of my hair, I thought, 'It's all over. I'm never going to work again: it's basket weaving me for me from now on.' But what actually happens is your casting changes: you suddenly start to get a lot of villains and coppers and soldiers and even the odd sensitive vicar - you become institutionalised.
I think the best villains are ones that you can look at and say, 'Yeah, he's obviously going about this the wrong way or going too far or whatever, but I can see where he's coming from.' Magneto's a great example of that, and the reason he and Charles Xavier can have such great conversations is that they can both make some good points.
I have a little bit of a pet peeve about how the middle class is depicted in movies. I feel like they tend to be either depicted in a very sentimental way, where everybody has a heart of gold except for the villains you're supposed to hiss at, or there's a sort of indie-style version... When it's done well, it's brilliant, it's 'Blue Velvet.'
One of the reasons Batman works as a character is that it's not beyond possibility that he could exist - you could become Batman if you had a billion dollars at your disposal. There's nothing paranormal or superhuman or supernatural about that character. And I think his villains work the same way. You could be one of his villains just as easily.
In the 1960s, Movement Conservatives created a cast of villains. The Brown v. Board decision in 1954 and President Eisenhower's use of troops to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957 enabled Movement Conservatives to resurrect old white fears that government activism was simply a way to funnel white tax dollars to African-Americans.