A Quote by Jared Harris

I think you always learn something in every character you play onstage, either personally or creatively. — © Jared Harris
I think you always learn something in every character you play onstage, either personally or creatively.
It's always been very important for me to be surrounded by people. It's never been enough for me to be successful alone. I want to be around people my own age who are also doing things I can learn from. And something Francis Ford Coppola said when we were doing the movie was, "If you learn something about people when you do dinner with them every week, you'll learn a lot more if you play softball with them every week." This is us learning what the climate is creatively among us.
I think anyone loves to play a character that is either evil to a certain extent or has a real definable character flaw. Those are always really fun, and, I think, funny.
I'm always studying something or trying to learn something, keep myself creatively occupied, because I think that energy can get kind of destructive if it doesn't have somewhere to go.
In regard to music, I just think that it's always best to have an attitude of being a perpetual student and always look to learn something new about music, because there's always something new to learn. Don't dismiss something out of hand because you think it's either beneath you or outside of the realm of where your interests lie.
Every character gives you something or the other, and you can't calculate it unless you are living the character. You learn something about the character that stays with you.
I love actors. I enjoy their company, and I get excited each and every time they bring a character I've written to life. Every so often a talented actor doesn't hook in correctly to a character; or someone gets lost in a labyrinth of over-complicated thoughts, and the character and play suffer. However, most of the time I find actors either end up doing exactly what was in my head, or sometimes do something even better.
I don't think that anyone learns anything. Well, I mean, you do always learn something if you have your eyes and ears open. You do learn something from every outing, every time that you go for it. But for me what actors do is interact and that's why you have to do that.
Something always made me save myself. Either the Betty Ford Center or going onstage to perform in the theater when many people didn't think I could do it.
I personally am happy doing a finite series as I can't play a single character for three years. Hats off to the actors who stay in a character for three four years and enjoy every moment of their character.
I always like to play roles where I either love the character or think that it's a story that I can tell better than anyone else. There are always reasons for me to do whatever I do.
I don't choose something unless I think I have a personal understanding and something I can offer. It's not always thematic. I wanted to do 'The Grinch' because I wanted to direct Jim Carrey creating that kind of comic fantasy character live. I just thought that would be a mind-blowing experience, and it creatively was.
I think it's my job to like any character I play - to understand and appreciate a character, to look at the world as much as possible from their point of view. I don't look at it just technically: learn the lines, figure out what gestures I want to bring and play, and that's it. I like to learn as much as I can about the person, and see what happens.
Brian is an archetypal character, a bit like Don Juan, which is how I play him. He's a blast to play. He believes unapologetically in his freedom. He holds nothing back. Something I'm learning is, you can't hate the character you play. If I think my character is an asshole, that's all that will come across. He is drawn in an extreme way, but that doesn't mean he's not a person.
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.
I think that every day is a learning experience. I mean, every time I go to a school I learn something else from a teacher or learn something else from a student, I learn something else from a parent. There's so much to know when you talk about education.
I'm always interested in the ways in which a character can inhabit either a theme or a premise personally, so that those scenes that are about his character or his relationship with other characters feel in context and don't seem to be apart from or oddly vestigial to the actual drama.
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