Marcel Dzama Quotes

I played a real nasty little girl but most of the roles I had up until then were very sweet and very nice.

While in 'Komban' I played the mother of Karthi, a relatively quiet character, the mother role in 'Kanchana 2' was a stark contrast.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I love the long-form format of television. I love being able to develop a character, over a long period of time.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

I'd never really been in a series, where you see a man at different points and perspectives in his life. Usually it's a film, where I'm playing a character who just comes in and offers something up.

In the initial season of a show, you're figuring out your character and their life and their background and you're putting together all the chapters of the book.

Being able to stay with a character over the course of years is a gift.

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

I have played a few lay saints in my time.

I was never a villain on the stage. I always played strong, sympathetic types. My first stage role with a speaking part, believe it or not, was as a priest. It wasn't until I began acting in films that the producers and directors saw me primarily as a bizarre villain.

'A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints' was the first real actor-actor part I did, and I hope to do more. Action movies are fun, but I'd be happy not to do them if there are better roles.

Usually, at the end of a film it's like I've finally gotten to know this person completely, and then we're done. That actually happened on the set of 'Twilight,' and then it happened again on 'New Moon.' Each time my character Bella became a different person, and I got to know that person and take her to the next level.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

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.

With movies, it's 10 or 12 or sometimes even 24 weeks, if it's a massive movie, to live within a character. But with a show that's successful, if you start in the first or second season and go until the end, you're always finding new elements of your character that are being added in because you start to live in them as human beings.

I do think there are trends in your life once you've been auditioning long enough. I was the angry teenager and then the sweet victim.

It's exciting to originate Jessica Jones. There's obviously more freedom in that versus playing a well known character.

The loveliest roles, for me, have a growth arc - a beginning, a middle, and an end - and I'm always grateful when I can find one of those emotional journeys.

I had been playing really interesting roles before I got great roles. Little ones - 'The Crying Game' I loved working on, and then 'Bird,' 'Ghost Dog,' so many films.

I really enjoy the constant change in TV. It's fun to play a character that is, hopefully, growing and developing over a long period of time.

I love doing a series because you get to see changes in a character and see her grow. It's a journey with change, and you don't get to see that long-term type of development with just a film.

When you're doing a movie, it's finite - you have a trajectory of where your character's going, and you follow that. Then the storybook closes.

Playing dysfunctional characters or crazy characters is only fun if they're well written. So I have been lucky enough to be asked to play crazy people who are very well written.

The idea of having different characters is really just to get the storyline across, you know? Coming from one particular character makes, to me, the story boring. I get that mainly from novels and that style of writing or movies where there's multiple characters who carry the storyline.