Russell Hornsby Quotes

It's nice to create a character, not just within two scenes, but within the journey of a whole movie. It's fun to do that.

I love series television because it's so much fun to have that much opportunity to paint the character.

In the process of developing a character, you do, in fact, start to take him on as a personality.

When I'm breaking in a character like Jessica Jones, I have this amazing opportunity to create her backstory. It's all of the work that happens before I'm ever on camera... Writing 'Bonfire' was like doing all of that fun stuff; it was like 300 pages of prep work.

When you get a character that you're just starting to work on, it's the most exciting and most terrifying feeling because you have endless hours of diving in, researching, reading, and decision-making.

Whenever you have a role where you don't get to know anything about the character, you have to invent it yourself. You have to feel like it came from somewhere.

My character on 'The Good Wife' is a smaller character, and his story arcs are typically season-long, unless it's a big episode for him. His transitions take place over many, many hours.

I'd never really been in a series, where you see a man at different points and perspectives in his life. Usually it's a film, where I'm playing a character who just comes in and offers something up.

That's the main thing that attracts me - characters who have big journeys. I like playing those people.

In the initial season of a show, you're figuring out your character and their life and their background and you're putting together all the chapters of the book.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

I'd never thought much about a series, because I liked the idea of picking a script I liked with a character I thought I could sustain for an hour. In a series, you live with one character day in and day out - and you only hope it will be one that will not drive you crazy.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.

You have to start from a place of trying to create a character.

The interesting thing about doing serial television is that the character is growing separate from you, the character and the show are growing, and you get to observe that and participate with it in a way that I think is actually really exciting for an actor.

With any project, but especially in television, I always try to look at where the character is starting from and where he's going to end up, and try to find the biggest arc that makes it the most exciting to play.

Whenever you're blessed and given a second season, you can really let the characters evolve. That first season, you're setting everything up. It's background, where they're coming from, what they want to do. And then you get to marinate in it that second season.

There is nothing like being able to develop a three-dimensional character over a long period of time. Sometimes you aren't able to fully portray a character because you only have a couple of scenes to do it in, and you don't get the full life and background of that character.

When you do films that have multiple sequels, you develop a character for a film.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

In a series, you really need to stay open-minded. It's not like a play or a film, where you can create and fully commit to your character's back-story.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.