It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.
I always find filming stressful. I get very caught up thinking about my character - 'Am I doing it right? Should it be done this way?'
Once I start putting all my little insecurities in my mind, I'm not actually acting. Then it's about me - and it should never be about me. It should be about the character.
What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.
I think the more the actor lets you know what he thinks of the character, the less the audience cares - like a comedian who laughs at his own jokes.
The thing that I like about the way characters are written on the show these days is that nobody's perfect. Everyone has made a lot of mistakes and bad choices.
All I wanted to do was read, to be told stories. Stories were full of excitement and emotions and characters that entertained and often inspired.
Dysfunctional co-dependent relationships always appeal to me. I don't know exactly how it started. I start writing sketches of characters and little scene-lets, and then it builds.
Will isn't a screaming queen - that's Jack's part. They needed someone to play the part for America. It's just not the same as Britain. To have a gay character as a lead is risky.
In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons.
As an actor, particularly because I'm - I would call myself a character actor. I change my look, my physical appearance and my body, my hair color, my whatever all the time for a role.
I saw 'Six Degrees of Separation' because my brother was in it. It was a watershed experience. It was theatrical and scary, and New York functioned like a character. John Guare became a hero for me.
I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.
Action films are great, but an action film that has characters that are compelling and a story that people can care about is something even better. We love to see action heroes that are vulnerable, that are sensitive, that are family people, that are...
I like films to be pure cinema, but I also like them to provide a snapshot of a family, a society or a character - something that can nourish you as a human being as well as an actor.
I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world.
Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
I get to actually experience what it would be like to be a psycho, which is not a fun one, or to be a cowboy, or to be a weird character of some sort. For me, it suits me. It suits my personality. I'm an emotional kind of person anyway.
Being 'Johnny' was almost like an out of body experience. I thought he was just a character that I'd created and could quite easily step away from, but it was much more difficult than that.
Characters have changed my mind about some very fundamental moral issues, and that's the real satisfaction in the way I write - the ultimate learning experience.
