David Sedaris Quotes

I do like to explore evil characters in my books.

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.

I did a play once where a reviewer said, 'Martin Freeman's too nice to play a bad guy.' And I thought: 'Well, bad guys aren't always bad guys, you know?' When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it's false.

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.

It's as boring to see a completely evil villain as it is to see a completely good guy.

There are no black and white, good or bad characters in 'Game Of Thrones,' but Joffrey was an exception. Just pure evil.

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

It's not all 'Jane Eyre' out there. In her sweet, honorable, slightly passive-aggressive way, Jane was as perfect as a protagonist can get while remaining interesting; in fact, she's one of my favorites. But most characters are more morally ambiguous.

I don't do villains often enough. There are two approaches: give them sympathetic, reasonable motivations for doing the most unspeakable things, or get inside heads that are interestingly broken.

The characters that have greys are the more interesting characters. The hero who sometimes crosses the line and the villain who sometimes doesn't are just much more interesting.

It's a basic tenet you learn at drama school. If you're playing someone evil, you can't make an objective moral judgment. You've got to get inside the character and empathize as much as possible.

The best men are not consistent in good--why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

A villain can be stylish, and his actions don't have to be explained. Heroes are boring in comparison, even anti-heroes, as there's always a justification for their bad actions.

I think, the first time I played Iago at the Public Theater, I realized I had a - much to my chagrin - I realized I had an instinct for these conflicted characters, for these torn characters, for these characters who could be described as evil. I wouldn't describe them that way.

For me, especially with the villain, it's not very interesting to write a guy who is just 100% bad.

I always felt like Azula and Long Feng were much more interesting villains and three-dimensional characters than Ozai, who was just sort of a big jerk. Like a really big jerk, but not very complex or human.

One of things that drives me nuts is you rarely get bad guys who are written very well.

Intensely vivid characters, terrible crimes, and a brutal deep-frozen landscape all prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cold nurtures good and evil as readily as heat ... and that Giles Blunt is a really tremendous crime novelist.

You never want to play too vampiric or generically evil, so you look for emotions or character traits that you can relate to.

You know that's why people don't like unlikeable characters. It's not that they're not interesting. Everybody knows the most interesting character in a book or a movie or whatever narrative is the villain.

I doubt if I have made the best use of all my calamities. Soft, amiable natures they would have refined to saintliness; of strong, evil spirits they would have made demons; as for me, I have only been a woe-struck and selfish woman.

When I start creating a villain, I start liking the villain and so the villain is not really evil.

I think even the characters that are fundamentally evil and wrong, I want people to really love them. I think that's important to writing believable characters. They don't have to be likable but they have to be loved, at least by the author.

The only boring part of it is finding the fact that got you from point A to point B. Most actors, if they're being honest, are not going to say that that's the most stimulating acting work they've ever done. But the dynamics of staring into the face of evil and it looking back at you, and seeing yourself in that or not, is interesting.

If it's a really well written villain, he probably has more layers than the archetypal good person. So that would be very attractive to an actor. No one chooses to be a villain; it's usually a reaction to something else.