Character Construction Quotes

It's true I have a hard time with the notion of creating a character. And I feel it's a limit. I'm always really impressed by actors who are able to construct a character, like Johnny Depp.

Carlos was a character, a character fabricated by Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, fabricated by the secret services of the epoch, fabricated by the governments of the epoch, by the radical groups of the epoch, by the communications media.

[My characters are] conglomerations of past and present stages of civilization, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, rags and tatters of fine clothing, patched together as is the human soul

There's a movie called 'Elizabeth: The Golden Age,' where I'm playing the King of Spain. It's a small role, but it's really, really interesting, the way I constructed it.

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

As I get older, I'm sort of fascinated with the idea of somebody who could construct an entire persona for themselves - one that was really, in a lot of ways, fundamentally at odds with who they really were as a person.

All of my characters tend to be montages of different people I've met: little bits and pieces of their personalities put together.

You start out with scripts pre-written, with no specific actor in mind, so you've got to build a character on top of that foundation. It's not just lifting words off the page, it's constructing a history around them as well.