I love playing really strung out characters, and characters that are really pushed to their limits and losing their mind. I think that's wonderful. To be able to lose it, in many ways, is just great fun to do.
Strong female characters - even if they don't necessarily make the same decisions that we might - make such great narrative material, especially when there's an equally strong male character in the mix.
When you're doing lots and lots of episodes and you're playing the same character, it's great because you really get to know the character and it becomes a really fast style and you find subtleties in it.
I'm a great believer in the character of a club. To me, character has a lot to do with how you compete. That creates urgency and toughness. That elevates the talent that you have.
The notion that public service requires men and women of good character now seems quaint.
Then I got the offer to play Buck Rogers, but I turned it down thinking it was a cartoon character. Well I was wrong, it wasn't at all. So I read the script and decided I liked the character, it had a good concept.
All of the characters in my films, they share one commonality. It doesn't matter whether they are good or bad, it doesn't matter whether they are smart or stupid, these characters all take responsibility for their own behavior. I'm much the same.
I have agreed to lend my voice to Nature's Guard, an animated series which hopefully will go into production in the near future. The characters are all animals. My voice will be for a character named Longtail.
Making a film of a work you've played for six weeks gives you intimate knowledge of the character. By the time you go in front of the camera you've worked out the behavior and life of a character.
I play a character every day of my life, and I don't want to play a character as myself. They can judge me as an actress, not as a person. I'm not a spokeswoman for Anna.
I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.
I like playing characters that are true to life, and there's no guarantee that any of us are going to be okay, but we intend to be, and we take the time to try to be. I don't think it's any different for a character.
For me, there is a stigma attached to playing beautiful parts. They are often empty characters whom the action happens around. I'm more drawn to characters with a complex internal life, who have a burning frustration underneath that keeps them going.
Dictators are ludicrous characters, and, you know, in my career and in my life, I've always enjoyed sort of inhabiting these ludicrous, larger-than-life characters that somehow exist in the real world.
I really believe that when you're playing a character that everything is contained in the script. If I'm pulling from things from my own life, then I think I'm being disingenuous to the character and the story.
I really love idiot, enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances; they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.
I think you have to love the characters that you write. I don't know how you could possibly write a TV show where you didn't love the characters.
I love the character of Jaime Lannister. He's just so complex - a character that we love to hate - but it's a lot more complex than hatred. It starts off, and he seems so arrogant and so smug.
I really love this character I played called Becky Freeley in a T.V. show called 'Miss Guided'. We only shot seven episodes, and nobody watched it, and it was on for, like, a second, but I really liked that character.
Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.
The main thing in acting is honesty, to feel the humanity and get to the essence of the character. You can't put anything into a character that you haven't got within you.
