Sarah Paulson Quotes

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested.

I like my heroes to be imperfect; I like them to be striving. I identify with that kind of aspiration to do better.

All of my characters are less than perfect.

Han Solo is more interesting than Superman because he's flawed. Superman's flaw is kryptonite, and that's it. He can make time go backwards, for God's sake, but with Han Solo or Indiana Jones, there's a bit of humanity there.

I let characters be human and flawed and relatable. When we do things that aren't that great, we can understand it.

I choose grey characters, as I enjoy playing a human character. I don't shy away from showing the shortcomings of my characters.

On the other side, if Im playing a good guy, then he has some problems too. Thats what makes people interesting, in life and in fiction.

It seems to me that most characters, in anything, are flawed in some way, just like most people. You look for the good in the flawed people and vice versa, and then try and make them appealing in some way.

I try to give both my heroes and villains an emotional dimensionality which provides the motivation for their actions.

I don't believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don't want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as in life, most people are a mixture.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

I'm drawn to villains that are three-dimensional and raw and that I can kind of see in my own life.

I'm with Milton and the Rolling Stones: I don't find the Devil an unsympathetic character. But in any case, my fiction is populated as much by people who do good as it is by those who do bad. I'm interested in imaginatively accommodating as much of the human as possible, for which you need both moral extremes and everything in between.

I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.

I don't play bad guys. I think that's why I keep getting cast as bad guys: because I don't want to play bad guys. I want to play human beings that struggle with life.

No actor can play a villain if they don't sympathise with him or her - otherwise the character just becomes a two-dimensional caricature.

I think I am more attracted to characters with a subtext, whatever that is and they don't necessarily have to be virtuous, but they have to at least be human.

Life is not simple, and people can't be boxed into being either heroes or villains.

Filmmakers tell stories to explore human nature, which is always a flawed thing.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

I think we are drawn to anti-heroes because that is what most of us are most of the time and it is good to see that we are heroic.

Broadchurch' was all about shades of grey, both in characters and storytelling, and I wanted to see that through to the end.

They're people who had flaws and who had affairs and had sex and had scandals, and very rarely do we look at the totality of our heroes' lives.

At the end of the day, what I try to bring to villainous characters is a sense of humanity.

I don't like characters who are either good or bad. I just don't experience that in life, so my writing hasn't evolved that way.