A Quote by John Lithgow

Oh, I'm dying to play Donald Trump someday, just because he's an unbelievable character. I'm a character actor; that's what you look for: outsized human beings. — © John Lithgow
Oh, I'm dying to play Donald Trump someday, just because he's an unbelievable character. I'm a character actor; that's what you look for: outsized human beings.
I didn't really look like a character actor, yet those were the roles I loved to play. If you were a character actor who didn't necessarily look like a character actor, you had to play bad guys.
I just don't play a character for the heck of it. Rather, I always look for a human element in every character that I play.
How you look is part of what acting is, but the way I look at it, every actor is a character actor. Someone once told me at a casting, 'You're a character actor in a leading man's body,' and I can live with that.
It's always the last one because it's so present in your body. I liked Scream of the Banshee because it was a real challenge. I thought, "How am I going to pull off this character?" But, I also thought, "Oh, man, I'm going to go for it." He's got all the defects of character that an actor loves to play. So, I had a really great time.
I liked 'Scream of the Banshee' because it was a real challenge. I thought, 'How am I going to pull off this character?' But, I also thought, 'Oh, man, I'm going to go for it.' He's got all the defects of character that an actor loves to play. So, I had a really great time.
The philosophical underpinnings of my approach to acting are that there are universal human qualities, and that every character is actually available within each one of us, that if we tap down into that universal humanness, we can find whatever character it is that we need to play already there within ourselves, and it's just a matter of peeling apart the onion that is you and finding that character within you, because of this universal human quality.
I just don't ever want to play the girlfriend. You know, the supporting character in the background who just sort of comes in and goes, "Oh, shucks." It's just a boring character.
Where does a character come from? Because a character, at the end of the day, a character will be the combination of the writing of the character, the voicing of the character, the personality of the character, and what the character looks like.
This is a corny actor thing to say, but the first step is that you can't judge the character that you're playing. If it's built in three-dimensional fashion, you'll just play a character who's going out and seeking the best version of their life that they can find. That gives the character an accessibility that everyone can identify with.
The only thing that I know how to do as an actor, as a trained actor, is you can't villainize the character you're playing. Whether it's a fictional character or a real character. Because then you operate from that sort of negative point of view, and you can't humanize him.
I've been lucky that even when I was younger, just because of my look or whatever, I was afforded the opportunity or called on to try. 'Can you do this Hispanic character?' 'Can you do this Italian character?' 'Can you do this Jewish-American character?' I just had to develop a facility for their accents.
What's actually amazing is that, after a couple of years of living with characters and writing characters and talking about characters, as we sit in the writers room and break episodes, it strikes you, every once in awhile, that you're talking about a character that's played by the same actor, who you've been talking about forever. We talk about a character dying, so you get emotional, and then you realize, "Oh, but wait, that actor is still on the show."
[Marco] Rubio, in particular, focused on something far more elemental. Trump`s character and record as a businessman, and in the process perhaps added a few chapters to the Democrat`s play book against [Donald] Trump.
I, for one, can't wait for this election to be over, because the curse of Donald Trump in a satirical comedy way is that, one, he's such a large character; it's hard to satirize at times. Two, he's sucking all the air out of every room he walks into so every attempt leads to covering only him. You can't turn a corner in New York City without people talking about Donald Trump, without talking about the same things about Donald Trump.
As human beings, of course, we're all compromised and complex and contradictory and if a screenplay can express those contradictions within a character and if there's room for me to express them, that's a part I'd love to play, so much more than a character who is heroic and one-dimensional.
I want to play a character which is as far away from myself as possible and a character that isn't even human, a superhero is just that.
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