Michelle Forbes Quotes

Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.

As a filmmaker, you're always supposed to be with your characters, in all movies, even if they're villains.

I've played a lot of villains, and I always feel slightly upset when people say, 'You were so bad!'

I tend to enjoy roles that I very closely identify with: fringe people and complicated characters, who might even be bad guys, or bad characters that have one redeeming quality.

I wouldn't call the Joker exactly easy to write.

There was a time when villains were stylized as very fashionable with gelled hair, girls in arms and cigar in mouth but now films have come closer to the reality. Realism has entered our industry.

Any show that kind of relish the damage of its main character without really investigating what that damage does, where it's from or what it means, is a show I think needs to be taken down a peg.

I always say, if a guy writes the same lead female character type over and over, we are not seeing their writing chops so much as their dating website wishlist.

Funny enough, you know who I used to really like in Lion King? It was Scar.

Eventually, after the hero and heroine, it is the antagonist who comes with the most anticipation in any film.

I would love to play a completely negative character if it's backed by a super script.

Now it comes to this stage of my career when I get to play the wicked witch all the time. You know you start off with Cinderella and then you end up playing the stepmothers.

In my entire career, only two actors challenged me as villain in my films. One is Raghuvaran's character of Mark Antony in 'Baasha' and Ramya Krishnan's portrayal of Neelambari in 'Padaiyappa.'

A lot of times, female characters - particularly the villains - come off as very one-dimensional. They get the short shrift in that they're only given the snappy comeback, or they're relegated to a very stereotypical role. I want to know what's driving them - that's what's really interesting.

EC3 began as a spoiled brat, and I felt it was important for the fans to be able to relate to the character - not as themselves but as someone they may have encountered in their lives and really just want to sock square in the face.

Black Panther is a great film'. It has the most compelling villain of any Marvel movie, and it deals admirably with the issue of diminishing jeopardy in a million superhero films where the world is going to end.

While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle underlying issues elsewhere in the story.

A villain number is a very valuable thing to have, but if you look at most musicals, one way or another there's an antagonist number.

It feels bad to play a bad guy. I did George W. Bush for years, and I hated him. But you have to give full voice to the villains. You have to have really convincing villains, or it's not worth anything as drama or comedy.

When I worked as an assistant director in 2007, Indraganti Mohan Krishna offered me a lead role. Now, the same director has made me a villain in 'Gentleman.'

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

I really didn't have any plan for her other than the henchgirl role, who was better at getting laughs out of the other gang members than the Joker was. I gave her the name Harley Quinn because I thought Harley was a fun name for a girl, and a lot of 'Batman' character names have a bit of a pun to them, like E Nygma.

We need the villain sometimes. It makes for an interesting story.

I would love to appear in 'The Defenders.' I don't know - because hopefully she'll maybe be on the bad side. I don't know - I don't know what they'd do with Elektra in 'The Defenders,' but that would be a good dynamic, I think - to be confronted by these four superheroes, and I think it would be interesting - I'd be curious to see what they do.

I love to play with the notion of who the protagonist is - who is the audience supposed to root for? I did it in 'Sicario' and feel it was the strength of the script - guiding the audience's allegiance toward the villain because they think he's the hero, until it's revealed that he's the villain.