A Quote by Sullivan Stapleton

I started here in Australia, playing a lot of roles but never the lead guy in shows here. I always tended to play the rougher guy, the criminal who gets caught or shot by the cops. Or the boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks.
I feel like it's really important for an actor to play different roles so people can see, "Oh, he can play that guy or he can play this guy." You're not just "THAT guy," that cowboy guy, that whatever guy. Then you are limiting yourself.
I come from the rougher side of Sydney. I don't know whether you can compare them to the projects, but in Australia, it definitely is the rougher side.
You can get caught up in the game, just like everybody else in the park. But I can't play favorites and hope this guy gets a hit or that guy gets an out. I have to make decisions based on data and common sense. I have to manage every game to win.
I certainly have never been an actor who can play the Everyman guy - or, I don't tend to get those parts. I've tended to play eccentrics. I've played a lot of villains, of course.
Call yourself "Colonel" and declare that your fortune was left to you by Dutch burghers from the seventeenth century. Now you're a solid citizen, the embodiment of hard work and rugged individualism. You're no criminal. The criminal is the guy who comes up short, who gets caught, who fails to adopt a respectable cover.
Playing a cop goes a long way. I have a lot of friends who are working as actors, and as soon as I started playing military characters or cops, and not the actual criminal that we're chasing on this show, they all said, 'You actually can have a career now.'
I got to playing villains-I don't know how. I think it's like anything else, in the movies in particular that if you establish yourself as something and you're lucky enough to keep getting hired. You know, there are guys who play the guy who gets the girl, guys who are the best friend of that guy, there's the funny guy, the villain.
I'm the guy who will persist in his path. I'm the guy who will make you laugh. I'm the guy who strives to be open. I'm the guy who's been heartbroken. I'm the guy who has been on his own, and I'm the guy who's felt alone. I'm the guy who holds your hand, and I'm the guy who will stand up and be a man. I'm the guy who tries to make things better. I'm the guy who's the whitest half Cuban ever. I'm the guy who's lost more than he's won. I'm the guy who's turn, but never spun. I'm the guy you couldn't see. I'm that guy, and that guy is me.
It wasn't as if I was simply some guy who had never seen the other side of the tracks.
I have a new show now called 'The Bridge,' where I play a guy who's a real-life guy. My character's based on the life of a guy named Craig Bromell who was a cop for 12 years and then became head of the police association, so basically the president of the union for 85,000 cops.
Because I'm a big guy, I was always playing the bad guy or whatever, but after I did 'The Blind Side,' where I played a father who's a really loving, likeable sort of person, a lot of those barriers were broken down. People saw me as something softer, not so much as a heavy anymore.
I've been playing the bad guy in the last seven or eight projects I've done. I like it. It's a lot more interesting! Being the good guy gets a little stale after a while, you know?
I really like playing the bad guy. There are so many more objectives to play when you're mad or villainesque, or when there's some agenda that you have. That's drama, that's where the heart lives. I love playing the bad guy, but especially the bad guy who's still with the girl.
If you're out for two years, and you beat one guy with a full-time job, without disrespect, but we're talking about fighting for a world title. You can't just beat a guy that went there to cover some guy that got injured, and then this guy, after two and a half years, gets a title shot.
I love playing roles where it's not just the good guy or the bad guy.
I started my career, actually, maybe the first 10, 11 years, playing the bad boyfriend with the gun. And I got ill with that and moved on, for some reason, to playing cops all the time.
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