The interesting thing about Hain is that he's not a very interesting character. He's not fabulously clever. He's not a great policeman. He's not hugely charismatic. I'd describe him as a kind-of Chekhovian character. He's an ordinary bloke, to whom e...
I think that the most important thing for me is, how is the character that I would be reading for? Is it interesting? Is there stuff to do? Are there things that you can do with the character? How can you play it out? Just those kinds of things that ...
The truth is that filmmaking is not really an actor's medium; it's really a director's medium, so all I can really control is the character that I'm playing. So I try to look for characters that are interesting and engaging and different than what I'...
It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your 'portrayal' of women. Even when I started out on 'The Office' eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women....
There's no doubt West Point impacted who I am... It has an enormous emphasis, not only on military aspects, but character development. Whether it's the honor code, or the interactions you have, both with the cadet leadership and the academy leadershi...
I always find the more you can draw on real life characters, people, situations, it works better. Certainly for designing a character, I prefer to draw on real people rather than other guys I've seen in movies, rather than 'here's my version of Clint...
I love it and it is a blessing to be able to have seventy-five to eighty episodes to develop a character and find your voice. You have a similar through voice, and yet you are making different decisions, and so you act differently and you make differ...
There is a general notion that playing a bubbly girl is undemanding and less challenging. But that's not the case. You need oodles of energy to bring out the spirit of a lively character. Besides, no two bubbly girls are the same. Every character I h...
You love all your characters, even the ridiculous ones. You have to on some level; they're your weird creations in some kind of way. I don't even know how you approach the process of conceiving the characters if in a sense you hated them. It's just a...
Once you have love as a motivator in a story, your character is free to do anything. Once you say the character is in love, he can do the craziest thing that nobody would do who's not in love. Once you're in love, you have that excuse to go and do wh...
For me, the acting part - and I have to say it makes me a little worried about my own psychological make-up - is that I just love to hide in other characters. I don't like to get up in front of people and talk as Kathy Baker. But as soon as you say '...
I do think that people get really emotionally involved in the TV shows that they love and I think that is fantastic. Of course they are going to have opinions. The other thing is that people project onto their television shows. They see a character a...
Robert De Niro taught me how to listen, and how to be part of the conversation. It's not just about reading your lines and saying what's in the script; you have to understand your character, along with the other characters so that you can always resp...
There's something extremely rewarding about following characters that you like and knowing that there's as many hours of viewing as you have the appetite for. You can tell more complex stories; you can create more complex characters in the longer for...
What we try to do at Disney and through Disney character voices is really maintain the integrity of our classic characters at all costs. So Ariel needs to be me for every project, and if there are any other Ariels floating around out there, it's not ...
Once he became a series character, I made the conscious choice that he would never act like a series character, never wink at the reader, never pull his punches. Better for him, better for me.
For me, the challenge of a period film is that, unlike a contemporary film where the character can be very free-form when it comes to the acting, there's a burden to acting in a period film because you have to stay within the character's historical b...
Costume, hair and makeup can tell you instantly, or at least give you a larger perception of who a character is. It's the first impression that you have of the character before they open their mouth, so it really does establish who they are.
I need to react to a script, to feel strongly about it in some way. And I need it to be a complex character for sure. And also, I think a lot about what kind of audience there is for the film, what they're looking for and ways to connect with them in...
Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.
If you can relate to what the character's going through, the story can be as ridiculous as possible, and people will relate to it. You can be fearless in your storytelling if you're vigilant about protecting your characters.
