Lawrence Osborne Quotes

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.

There's something really charming about a character that is fundamentally flawed and does some pretty despicable things, but yet you still kind of love him.

I'm always much more interested in flawed heroes than in perfect ones.

I never play a villain that I don't have something I can either do or say so the audience sees there is something redeemable about them. In other words, I don't want to do evil for evil's sake. I don't want to do Jason slasher movies. There's no point in that.

Very few of my characters are totally heroic or totally villainous.

Bad guys are complicated characters. It's always fun to play them. You get away with a lot more. You don't have a heroic code you have to live by.

The go-to reflex all over Hollywood is still likeability. I've always had a problem with it because I think I have a weird barometer in the sense that some of the characters I've cared about the most in movies are characters that are often thought of as despicable.

Sometimes there is more exploration in the character for a villain.

If you don't care for the villain, if you don't love him and hate him at the same time, then he's just boring.

The bad guys are not typical; they are not just bad, they are interesting. They might be good or bad.

We can bring to characters dark and bright sides that nobody even dreams about.

You get Don King's point of view in what is almost a Shakespearean, classical technique. He comes across almost like a lovable rogue, like Iago in 'Othello' or Richard III. He's doing all these bad things, but I kind of like him. It's like 'Pulp Fiction': Everybody's a bad guy, yet you like them.

Shakespeare's villains are fabulous because none of them know that they are villains. Well, sometimes they do.

I thought he was an interesting central figure, central character, one who is definitely not your typical central character figure in a film, who's easy to like. He's not easy to like. It forces you to involve yourself with what's going on.

That's sort of what I like about this character is that he's not the good guy, he's not truly the bad guy.

One of the things about the '70s films I love - the films 'Nightcrawler' is being compared to, like, 'Taxi Driver' - is that they never put their flawed characters into any one box.

A lot of the time, a moral compass is all that separates a hero from being a villain; otherwise, the two are very much the same. Both are generally the richest and most complex characters, and they get to have all the fun. I guess it's those types of roles that I ultimately gravitate towards.

You have to be careful so you don't make your character dull and predictable. Sometimes you have to bend the script a little... The bad guys are mostly the same on the paper... A bad guy wouldn't think of himself as bad.

Having been raised by actors who love moral ambiguity and flawed protagonists, I feel like it's sort of in the blood to want to take it on.

A lot of the bad guys I've played just haven't had much dimension to them.

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

I don't want to watch a show or a movie about the guy who doesn't have any problems, who is sort of a goodie two shoes and just does everything morally right, because that's not the person I relate to. That's not who I am. That's not what anyone is.

I would relish a role that really shows a bit of background into how the bad guy got the way he is... a little more complex than cackling behind a hooded cloak.

It is difficult to portray grey characters because there is a very thin line between being nasty and slightly negative.

I get the feeling that audiences have become mature and they understand that not every character is in black or white. There can be grey shades to it.