The result is a picture that represents so much of what I want and rarely get from a movie - a couple of hours filled with characters who are as exciting as the people I know in real life.
Whenever I work on a part, I look at the world through the filter of the character and I pick things they might use through my observations of real life.
In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.
I don't think my approach to acting is all necessarily in service of the character. I think, selfishly, I've put it in service of myself, my perspective on the world and helping my life.
Look, I play all these tough guys and thugs and strong, complex characters. In real life, I am a cringing, neurotic Jewish mess. Can't I for once play that on stage?
What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.
To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.
If my accomplishments frighten someone, it's nothing to do with me - that's to do with them. But the men who are in my life see me as a person - as a woman - not as a character I've played.
People tell me that my appearance in real life is better than on-screen. Perhaps people think I am exactly like the characters I play on TV.
So they've actually - it's not that her character is a singer, but she had ambition to do that at an earlier time in her life. So I've actually sung two or three times now on the show.
I've never judged anybody by how they look or how they dress. I basically judge them on their character. And that's how I lead my own life.
Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.
It was sort of that in-between area when people don't talk about their personal lives. That's the kind of life I think Kerry would be living now if it weren't for the Lopez character sort of outing her.
In my work, I want to convince people that I'm that character. If they know everything about Lesley Manville - private life, all of that stuff - it doesn't help. So the kind of anonymity I enjoy is key.
The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.
Middle-class Pakistani cultural life is what I've seen, what I know - they're not all screaming faceless mullahs. It's disturbing that in American films, the character on the other side is not even named.
I'd say that on 'Friends' my character was the guy bouncing around the room. I'm no longer that guy, necessarily, in my life. I used to be. But I'm not now.
We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.
He's meant to be that classic Homer, Ulysses, Hercules - a character who goes out or has some gift of some kind. He goes on a journey of discovery and part of that is falling into darkness - the temptations of life.
The cast, led by the extraordinary Jennifer Lawrence, is absolutely wonderful across the board. It's such a pleasure to see how they've embodied the characters and brought them to life.
The character of Rosie is based on a woman who used to live in the same apartment building I lived in many years ago. She's taken on a life of her own, of course.
