Karen DeCrow Quotes

We want our villains and antagonists to have distinct motivations.

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 don't think most people are all heroic or all villainous, so I find ambiguity of motivations to be a natural human condition.

People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

I think all of us have a hero and a villain in us.

I know myself - I cannot just play a cliche. It has to be a character; it has to be written with the complexity of the human being behind. Could be bad, could be good, could be someone we would hate, but still, I need a reason for that influence, and I need to understand why.

I think, to me, I was always taught you never approach any character as a villain. Every human being on earth really believes that they're doing the best thing. We all have our rationalizations.

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.

I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.

Somebody - and I'm going to guess it was Hitchcock - once said that everyone has their reasons. If you remember that, as a writer, you'll write better than average villains.

I feel like life is much greater than a hero or a villain: there's good people that sometimes make mistakes.

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

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.

'3:10 to Yuma' was one that I just kept on talking and thinking about after reading it. And I think the reason is because, like in most Westerns, you have the very clear-cut bad-guy/good-guy, however, as the movie progresses, you kind of see that it's a very fine line that divides these two.

Villains are fun. I think the important thing in playing them is that they don't see themselves as villains. It lets you be a little more expansive.

I have always found myself playing the hero, but I love villains. Villains have more fun.

I find the trick to playing a villain is that you can't be bad for the sake of being bad. It has to be rooted in some sort of heartbreak.

There are some characters in 'The Names' who are very much heroes and others who can only be called villains. But generally, as we get to know them, we see most of the characters are, or at least become, quite nuanced.

I always felt that heroes were essentially dull. Villains were more exotic and could do more interesting things.

You don't play villains like they are villains. You play them like you know exactly where they are coming from. Which hopefully you do.

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

When you're playing the good guy, you want to find the dirty parts - and when you're playing the bad guy, you want to find the vulnerability.

The best strategy for making people care about what happens is if they empathize with both sides. If you just have a Villain with a capital V, it becomes very two-dimensional.

Generally speaking, I would say villains are a little more exciting to play, but if you get a flawed hero, then that can almost be just as amazing.

I love that everyone on 'Scream Queens' has a moment where they are the hero, and they are the villain.