A Quote by Mahershala Ali

It's important for people of colour to have the opportunities to play characters that are as nuanced - as three-dimensional, as human - as the characters who we traditionally see getting to play the protagonist. The good guys and the bad guys. The reason that is important is because it's a better reflection of the reality of the world we live in.
I don't play bad guys. I think that's why I keep getting cast as bad guys: because I don't want to play bad guys. I want to play human beings that struggle with life.
Creating a world that reflects the inner voyage of our characters was really important. Also, because this isn't a black and white show, and this isn't about bad guys and good guys, but it's about good men being capable of bad things and vice versa, I wanted to be in a city that had contradiction.
I like to play characters, man. I almost don't even think of them as good guys or bad guys. I know that's a hard thing to realize, but I really just think of them as characters.
There is something, yeah, I mean traditionally it's more fun to play bad guys than it is good guys and when you're playing a bad guy, yeah, the fun in it is to see how scary you can be, how horrible you can be. And it's surprising what you come up with.
In general, I think writing characters, no one is 100 percent good or bad, and certainly, the bad characters never think they're bad themselves. Even the worst characters don't feel like they're bad guys on the inside.
I did a play once where a reviewer said, 'Martin Freeman's too nice to play a bad guy.' And I thought: 'Well, bad guys aren't always bad guys, you know?' When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it's false.
What I meant by that is, any time you have adversity, now you've got a chance to see all of these guys play every game the rest of the way like it's a playoff game. What you want guys to do when there's adversity is to play harder and play better, and that's when you see what kind of guys you have in your locker room.
I'm going to try to play some good guys for a while and just see how that is. It's hard to enjoy them as much as the bad guys, and the clothes are nowhere near as good. Good guys don't wear nice suits!
Bad guys are complicated characters. It's always fun to play them. You get away with a lot more. You don't have a heroic code you have to live by.
You know, the best-laid plans of mice and men... I like playing bad guys, and I don't have a problem doing that. They're interesting characters, and there's as many different kinds of bad guys as there are good guys - they're rich, they're strong, they're powerful, and so that's fine with me.
The thing is, I never see my characters as psychopaths. I see them as really crippled victims who just happen to do bad things. And I never see them as bad guys; I see them as darker characters. I never see anything as good or bad; it's more light or dark, and the in-between is the grey.
Interesting characters are troubled characters. The only problem I've had in my business is very few people - unfortunately, very vocal - confusing the difficult role that I play with me. I play these guys, but I'm not like them. I've been accused of being difficult to work with.
We lie to ourselves and try to escape that bitter reality by saying that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and that we're the good guys. We condemn people as evil to reassure us that we're not like them. If there's to be any hope of preventing these things from happening again, we have to look at the reality. That any act of evil in our history was committed by human beings like us. That, very often, we're all implicated in it.
We have three kinds of guys on our team. We have guys that get it; they play good; they understand how to play winning football. We have some guys that are trying to get it, and they are working hard every day? We are supporting them, and we want the guys that have it to support them. Then we have some guys that don't get it and don't know that they don't get it. We are trying to replace them. We only have a couple left.
I like to create characters that are larger than life. But it's funny because I do a lot of bad guys, and it's because, being European, I usually get cast as bad guys. It's just how it is.
Just like how male actors get to play varied characters, I would also like to play characters that people don't normally see female characters portraying on screen.
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