A Quote by Michael Shannon

It's obviously a lot harder to try and be a good guy than it is to be a bad guy. The world is a fundamentally evil place, it seems like. So in order to be a good person, you have to fight temptation and vice.
When you're playing a good character, you have an idea that you're playing the hero and the good guy. Actually, I think you're more stymied playing the good guy than you are the bad guy. As the bad guy, you have no inhibitions. Nothing stops you from doing what it is you feel you have to do. You do it because it's what's required.
Most big popcorn movies are 'bad guy does something to good guy, good guy gets revenge on bad guy, sets the world right, and moves on.' And 'Ender's Game' is just not that simple, so it's an exciting challenge. It's a little terrifying, and let's see how audiences respond.
I think, very often, we're addicted to procedurals, those good guy/bad guy shows, and the 'problem' with procedurals is they all follow the same formula: The bad guy does his thing, the good guy goes after him, and in most cases, the good guy figures out who did it and catches him.
One of the last things that my dad and I discussed, and it sticks with me today, is that he no longer believed in the concept of Good Guy/Bad Guy. He believed in the idea that one guy is trying to beat the other. However, he would say, 'You can be a Good Guy/Bad Guy, or you can just be a star.'
The problem was, you couldn't have one without the other. There couldn't be a bad guy unless there was a good guy to create the standard. And there couldn't be a good guy until a bad guy showed just how far off the path he might stray.
I don't believe that there's a good guy and a bad guy. Unless it's like Superman or Batman, there is no good guy and bad guy.
Everyone likes to be the heel. Everyone wants to be the bad guy. I mean, I love being the bad guy, but the crowd doesn't want me to be a bad guy. In real life, I'm too much of a good guy to be a bad guy.
I don't like to have a strategy going into a fight. If he has a good right hand or a good kick or good submissions then I'll try to avoid that, but I like to be in a fight and I like to go into the fight. Even in jiu-jitsu I didn't think of pulling this guy into guard or take him down because I like to go into the fight and see what happens.
You know, I think a lot of times what happens when we as actors know we're playing a bad guy is we get into bad guy mode. You know what, man? In real life, bad people do good things too and good people do bad things. So you don't necessarily have to be the stereotypical bad guy to still do bad things.
You can't ask the guy with the checkbook to always be the person. So, we actors have to try. And believe me, it's not just young people who are struggling with this, trying to get things of substance made because of the proliferation of technology that it's just harder and harder to get things that really matter made. But they are being done and you just have to fight the good fight and try to... if you have something that you have written, you have to do your best to try to get it made in whatever way you can.
What intrigues me is that people kind of naturally want to label or pigeonhole the characters. They want to make it easy for themselves to go, "All right. There's the good guy, there's the bad guy, there's the girl. Okay, I get it now." But life isn't one-dimensional. The world isn't simply divided into good versus evil. I think we're all capable of both. So any time the hero does something I'm not crazy about, or the bad guy does something I can relate to, I'll find it more interesting.
My inner motivation is to make the world a better place; the bad guy and the good guy think the same thing.
I haven't spent my entire career playing the guy in the bad hat, although I have to say that the bad guy is frequently much more interesting than the good guy.
When I play a good guy, I try to explore them and figure out what shapes them and makes them interesting. When I'm playing a bad guy, I try to explore everything that makes them good. No one ever really thinks that they're a bad guy.
There's always the same amount of good luck and bad luck in the world. If one person doesn't get the bad luck, somebody else will have to get it in their place. There's always the same amount of good and evil, too. We can't eradicate evil, we can only evict it, force it to move across town. And when evil moves, some good always goes with it. But we can never alter the ratio of good to evil. All we can do is keep things stirred up so neither good nor evil solidifies. That's when things get scary. Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.
I think the self is complicated, that at various times we are all various people, and wrestling actually does a lot with that. You have things like heel turns where a person goes from being a good guy to a bad guy.
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