Character Quotes - Page 591

When you play a character it's the persona you bring across from a book to film, or book to script to film. If I play Frank Sinatra, there's gonna be things I do in a movie that Frank might not have done, but it's the personality that comes across.

Playing Unique hasn’t changed how I feel about myself, but it has changed how I hold myself. Unique is so confident that I found myself [saying], ‘You need to be the role model that your character intends you to be.’

As a director you have to be at 30,000 ft objectively looking at everything, wondering if you're making the right objective, emotional, story, character choices. As the writer, while you're asking all of those same questions, you're also forced by the nature of what writing is to be looking at everything under a microscope. That's the difference between the two jobs.

I love the opportunity to tell the story about the characters through the music.

You used to have to make a choice. Is it a serialized television show, or is it a stand-alone or procedural? We were wildly influenced by The X-Files. Even when we created Fringe, it was the same thing. It's the gold standard of all gold standards, in genre television, and it was so wonderful because you felt so much for those characters.

I think what people watch television for is the emotional continuity, from episode to episode, and feeling that the experience that they had, four episodes ago, has actually been building to an episode that comes later, and knowing that the characters are growing, as a result of that, and making mistakes, is really, really important to the way people connect to television.

I don't think my looks are modern. I always imagined I'd end up doing Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare all my life and never play a contemporary character.

What I like in comedies are really two things: stories that are character-driven and stories that are rooted in authenticity.

And one of the things that's interesting about how they're doing the show is that the audience almost knows more than the characters do in some of these scenes, and the extent of that is unique. So it's grown into a different show in a way. It's sort of grown into a different experience watching it.

Because if you remember - and people forget this - the first two years of Game of Thrones everybody was going, "I don't know what's going on, but I really like it." And you really didn't know what to make of a lot of people, and now it's changed and people aren't really talking about that. Now it's like you're watching West Wing or Friends, you know the characters and you're like, "What in the world is going to happen?"

The funny thing about being Catholic, and I was raised Catholic, is that you identify with the Church, just as part of your character. Nevermind what you believe, it's just who you are.

That's one of the benefits of having many seasons behind you, is you have this wealth of characters that you can reintroduce, and that have a history with your current regulars, so you don't have to start from scratch.

Is as if the music is another character or as if it was a part of this great opera. I also through about this project as a structure or as a sculpture made out of colors, rhythm, characters, and brush strokes, but with every single one of these always supporting one another.

Music helps define the character and is an extension of the character somehow, so that you are able to use both the songs themselves and the way that you sing them to tell something about the character and his story, as well as develop a performance style.

I see myself as a character actor, and I've always been drawn to playing characters that are different from myself because acting is escapism for me. I've never been that comfortable playing people that are like me.

I started off as an actor thinking that I would be this Romeo, this dashing leading man. It turns out that I'm a character actor.

There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.

There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we're more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be.

It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life.

One of the benefits to television is that you're with these characters for years, you know them so well.

I don't think of an actor. I think in the character, and then I search for the actor. Usually I'm thinking without names, because they will change my idea. No big egos. If I want egos - just mine. That is enough.

Adversity is the touchstone of character: it is not in success but in misfortune that hidden powers bear fruit.

Hearing the faraway sounds of children at recess makes me understand that I am no longer life's main character.

Well, actors get very frustrated with giving control to other people. They have their own ideas and wants for their characters. Warren Beatty once told me that he thought actors ended up directing out of frustration. If you have a strong sense of how to communicate a film, you should direct. The problem is that it is a huge commitment. I'd rather direct a play than a film due to the time. A movie can tie you up for a year or more.

A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world - intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.