I would have to say that I have to concentrate more when I'm doing comedy. There are so many details that make up any character, but developing a character for a dramatic role seems to come more naturally.
The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know...
Sometimes when you do a part, the wall between you and the characters can be very porous. You can sort of move in and out of your character's persona and being. And that just couldn't happen on this one because of working with him.
I think to really be literate in nu shu you only need about 600 characters because it is phonetic. So you're able to then create many words out of one character.
I was a repertory actor, which meant that I did a play every week. I was a different character every week; for a year, I was doing 40 or 50 characters.
I've had a couple of people come up to me after screenings and say they kind of sympathized with the character. I always get a kick out of it when people say that. It means I did something maybe a little bit to the credit of the character.
To play someone when the character masks their own emotions, doesn't understand their own emotions, has no release for their own emotions, and yet is full of emotion - that is a much harder character to play than someone who has somewhere to put it.
I lost 90 pounds and my blood pressure went down to a normal level and the salt in my urine disappeared. And that was when I had to make the transition from fat character actor to thin character actor.
How you look is part of what acting is, but the way I look at it, every actor is a character actor. Someone once told me at a casting, 'You're a character actor in a leading man's body,' and I can live with that.
When I know what the character I'm supposed to play wants in general terms, and when I know what did the other characters want to do, that's when all these wills collide and the emotions show up.
The sexy moments for me, I wasn't thinking of them as sexy. I was thinking of them as more specific to my character. So it was necessary for my character's development in the movie, so that's how I played it.
When people embrace character, there's latzie. It's the stuffing of a scene that's not written. It's not in the stage direction and it's not in the words. When people embrace character, it informs their living, breathing moments in a scene so well.
I try to think what the character is thinking. Then, hopefully, I begin to feel it. I act and react not because I'm recalling a dog killed by a fire engine, but because I'm concentrating on what the character is going through.
A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes... a sh...
I had some experience when I joined 'The Sopranos' in the last season. My character married Christopher, and everyone loved Adriana. I knew what it was like to join a very beloved, secretive show and following a very iconic character.
There's this thing in TV that I find hysterical where the writers and creators will ask us if you want to know what happens to your character or if you want to experience it episode by episode. In the theatre, we always know the ending; we always kno...
The only person who had any control was Jonathan Harris. His character was so flamboyant that he was able to make things happen. My character was fairly one-dimensional, so I had my relationship with Dr. Smith and with the family.
I'm an actor and I've created a lasting and memorable character named Frasier, who is not me, but who most people think is. So when I have a chance to play something that's different, I embrace it because it's fun; also in this case, he's a memorable...
To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It's hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff - so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.
In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.
In my books, women often solve the problem. Even if the woman is not the hero, she's a strong character. She does change the plot. She'll often rescue the male character from some situation.
