Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.
There's always a connection to be made whether you're playing a psychopath or whatever. It doesn't really matter; you've got to find this thing that you relate to with each character otherwise you're missing something.
I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.
Show the reader what the character thinks about, and then the reader will think about it too.
I think the ultimate goal is that when we're off-stage, we know everything our character is thinking. Hopefully when we are on-stage, our thoughts are our character's thoughts because we really know that much about them.
When I'm following what a character does in a book I don't have to think about my own life. Where I am. Why I'm here. My moms and my brother and my old man. I can just think about the character's life and try and figure out what's gonna happen. Plus when you're in a group home you pretty much can't go anywhere, right? But when you read books you almost feel like you're out there in the world. Like you're going on this adventure right with the main character. At least, that's the way I do it. It's actually not that bad. Even if it is mad nerdy.
I can't help moving my face - reacting - when I watch a movie, because I'm really inhabiting a character. I know this is weird, but it demonstrates what I love about cinema: it allows you to live a different life, to have a different experience, to disappear for two hours. I think it's wonderful.
I think you're bound to get a sense of any character that you play. It's not something you often do in comedy.
I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.
When I'm playing a serial killer, I'm in it. I'm not judging him. I'm not judging his environment. I'm just looking for the why. Why is he the way he is? But, there's no doubt that, if you're a good actor, you're going to take this stuff home with you.
If you never fall in love with your character, you'll never be able to do that character justice. No matter who it is, no matter what the character does, you have to find the reason for it. Everyone's got a reason for what they do, even if it's a reason that they're not proud of.
The thing for me, and I can only really judge this by what I respond to myself as an audience member, I really only respond to a movie if I'm interested in the people who are in it. It's really that simple. If I'm not, then it's all noise.
Eventually I realized that Cry Baby was a character that was based off of me, and that we had a lot of similarities.
If you have the personalities down, you understand them and identify with them; you can stick them in any situation and have a pretty good idea of how they're going to respond. Then it's just a matter of sanding and polishing up the jokes. But if you've got more ambiguous characters or stock stereotypes, the plastic comes through and they don't work as well. These two characters clicked for me almost immediately and I feel very comfortable working with them.
I'm not going to experience the reality of hardship that sometimes my characters live in. I'm very cautious about that.
The reason most of us go to the movies is to be involved in someone else's moral dilemma.
Once you're imagining being the main character, and you're having the conversations and actually being there, the magic in fiction writing takes over.
I played a father a few times. You don't have to shoot heroin to play a heroin addict ... I'm not running for president but I could play a candidate. Most of the time, you don't really have to have those things in your life to understand what they're like.
For me, personally, I'm more comfortable with what I would call third-person entertainment, meaning watching a character that's explicitly not me and experiencing something through a character's eyes, than what I would call first-person entertainment, which is a video game in which I am the character.
I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.
I think it's always difficult no matter how similar your characters are to yourself to get into that mindset, because however much they are similar to you, they're not you.
I think it's my job to like any character I play - to understand and appreciate a character, to look at the world as much as possible from their point of view. I don't look at it just technically: learn the lines, figure out what gestures I want to bring and play, and that's it. I like to learn as much as I can about the person, and see what happens.
You kind of worry for the characters in a way that you don't normally in sci-fi, because sci-fi tends to be about the ideas, and this is about people.
I wouldn't think of my characters' moralities at all. And I think I identify fully with every main character I've written about and would say that I am them pretty much. So in terms of that I don't think I'm similar to Bret Easton Ellis .
Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up - some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.
