A Quote by Willem Dafoe
It's true in the beginning I started playing villains, and I think that's pretty clear, because if you don't conventionally look a certain way and you've got a certain kind of presence when you're young, then what's available to you is character roles, and the best character roles when you're young tend to be villains.
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The kind of roles that I'm right for on stage tend to be quite young, and ingénue roles can be a little unfulfilling. They tend to fall into one slot: play the innocent young girl who comes on and does a lot of crying.
Usually being a young actor, you've got to go through certain levels of hierarchy, going through bit parts and extra roles and then kind of progressing up the food chain and having the size of your roles grow in that sense.
I generally play villains once every three or four years by choice because I get offered villainous roles a lot, because of the way I look and whatever. And I tend to avoid them because I think you can end up in a cul-de-sac of your own making if you're cast in that.
Playing villains is very liberating because unlike the leading man, nothing is expected of you. Leading men have to look good, they have to behave in a certain way, they have to fulfill an audience's expectations. But as a bad guy, you have free license to take the audience by surprise. And that's what audiences want - they want unpredictability from their villains. The villain's job is to subvert it.
In reality, there are very few villains who view themselves as villains. They just have a certain agenda at a certain time.
As a young actor, I was advised to bide my time. Back then, there weren't good roles for someone like me. There were handsome leading men and character actors for smaller supporting roles. But I was told to hang in there, and it was good advice. We're all character actors now. Even a handsome man is a character actor at my age.
One of the reasons Batman works as a character is that it's not beyond possibility that he could exist - you could become Batman if you had a billion dollars at your disposal. There's nothing paranormal or superhuman or supernatural about that character. And I think his villains work the same way. You could be one of his villains just as easily.
I liked the character very much and even in general roles like this entice me. I started my journey in Punjabi film industry with negative roles, and then gradually comic roles and situational comedy fell into my kitty.
I love character roles. I'm happier in them. I look for roles that have some kind of complexity.
What I look for is identifying what the utility of a character is to the telling of the story overall. If I can identify that from reading the script, then I've got a clear idea of whether or not I think the character is worth playing.
I have been thinking a lot about what we see in villains, how we relate to villains, and what it is about certain villains that we actually empathize with. Like Macbeth. We're not supposed to like a guy who kills the king and takes over, but there's something about him we're really fascinated by.
I didn't want to do character roles because when you are doing comic characters, you only get character roles.
I'm a character actor and that's what I do. All the roles that I've had have been mainly support roles, because character actors don't usually get the lead in movies. It rarely happens.
I think it's ridiculous that you need to look a certain way to be conventionally pretty.
I'm a big fan of character actors like Johnny Depp and Gary Oldman. My goal is to continue playing character roles in indie films and move into playing character leads.
There have been times I thought that when I got a certain point in the story, a certain character was going to do a certain thing, only to get to that point and have the character make clear that he or she doesn't want to do that at all. That long phone conversation I thought the character was going to have? He hangs up the phone before the other person answers, and twenty pages of dialog I had half written in my head go out the window.
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