Understanding the Character Quotes

Whenever you take on playing a villain, he has to cease to be a villain to you. If you judge this man by his time, he's doing very little wrong.

Sometimes I'll go for something more because of the story, or more because of the director. But, generally, I have to feel like it's something that I have a real sympathy for - a person that I can completely go, "Oh, wow, oh, I'm there." Otherwise I don't feel like I will be able to pull it off at all. I know I haven't done everything very well in the past; some things have worked and some things haven't. But I need to feel like I can feel about the person, understand that person, I suppose.

I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.

To embody a character, you have to lose all judgment about them.

My experience with working with really great actors is you don't have to act. All you have to do is listen. And, that's sort of a virtue and a wonderful thing to be able to experience. It's so much less work.

I don't know how to play a character unless I love him.

I love to work this way - I love the time of preparation. If you feed yourself with all the information and you get to understand who the character is then you can really be her.

Having read the source material, I had to have drawn from that. As a fan, I wanted to remain true to that character, but it was really cool because, as we were figuring these characters out, I realized that there was a lot more backstory, rather than what I had gotten just from reading the book. Glenn doesn't really get much of a backstory there. He's just seen as this kid who is put in this situation, not knowing where his mind-set is, but then you slowly see him start to develop.