I always watched movies and rooted for the bad guys, you know? I've always been that kind of guy. I still hold some respect for criminals that are good at their jobs.
I think being a character actor is exciting in that it allows you to embody completely different things, whether it's through wild accents or a crazy bad guy or a drunken good guy.
We were living in a tumultuous time, when the world was upside down. Freeman produced a show that was black and white, the good guys versus the bad guys.
It's certainly more interesting for me as an actor, but I think it's also more interesting for the audience to see three-dimensional characters, rather than just a bad guy or a good guy.
When you're playing the good guy, you want to find the dirty parts - and when you're playing the bad guy, you want to find the vulnerability.
With stunt guys, you can punch them in the face because it's, you know, just part of work. You feel bad about that but not as bad as if you punch another actor.
Actors will always tell you it's more fun playing bad guys. A lot of the time, it's criminals who are the people who don't care. There's something extraordinarily seductive about the guy who doesn't care, and to play that guy is terribly empowering, ...
I'd been trying for a while to get parts that weren't just the English bad guy, so it was quite refreshing to be playing someone who was a compassionate, decent guy.
My favorite movie is 'The Outlaw Josey Wales' with Clint Eastwood, a guy who gets his family killed by the bad guys then goes on a journey of revenge, eventually discovering himself - very existential.
I've been playing the bad guy in the last seven or eight projects I've done. I like it. It's a lot more interesting! Being the good guy gets a little stale after a while, you know?
It's obviously a lot harder to try and be a good guy than it is to be a bad guy. The world is a fundamentally evil place, it seems like. So in order to be a good person, you have to fight temptation and vice.
It's so funny, I've done so many projects where I've been interrogated. I guest starred on almost every hour drama, and I'm always the guy they think is the bad guy but then they find out is not.
I'm big and a lot of the stars are smaller so if you're big and mean looking, you play bad guys. After Blade Runner, I was the meanest guy in Hollywood.
People... need a time to laugh. It's up to us to bonk ourselves on the head and slip on a banana peel so the average guy can say, 'I may be bad, honey, but I'm not as much of an idiot as that guy on the screen.'
People say, 'Jay, you're a great guy, you just had a couple of bad nights.' People that have themselves under control don't have a couple of bad nights like that. Plain and simple.
There's good and bad everywhere in any aspect in life. The only people who we can't really trust are politicians. Because those guys lie to everybody and constantly.
I never see my bad guys as simply bad. They want pretty much the same thing that you and I want: they want to be happy.
The bad guys I play don't want to be bad. It's the struggle between the part of them that's an animal and the part that's the intellect that's interesting.
The thing is, I never see my characters as psychopaths. I see them as really crippled victims who just happen to do bad things. And I never see them as bad guys; I see them as darker characters. I never see anything as good or bad; it's more light or...
In writing, a good guy must never break any of the Ten Commandments. A bad guy must break every one. That's why writing female characters is so much fun. They're not GUYS at all.
Branch Rickey once said of me that I was a man with an infinite capacity for immediately making a bad thing worse.
