A Quote by James Spader
I didn't really look like a character actor, yet those were the roles I loved to play. If you were a character actor who didn't necessarily look like a character actor, you had to play bad guys.
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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.
How you look is part of what acting is, but the way I look at it, every actor is a character actor. Someone once told me at a casting, 'You're a character actor in a leading man's body,' and I can live with that.
Every director is always directing around the play. If you have an actor who really doesn't get the character well enough, you have to direct the play around that character. You have to make choices with that actor. If you have an actor that really doesn't get the role and has certain visions of the role, sometimes you have to direct around that actor.
None of the actor methods ever discussed what it would be like to play a character on film for over a decade, and what it must be like to return to a character and imagine the time off-screen, which is interesting. There's something as an actor that I enjoy about evolving characters.
I think of myself as a character actor, compared to a straight actor. I know a character actor in England is pretty much the same as in the States; you're actually hired to put on terrible teeth and stuff like that.
Whether or not I am a 'character actor' or any other kind of actor, I really don't know. When people call me a 'character actor,' I fail to understand what it means.
Oh, I'm dying to play Donald Trump someday, just because he's an unbelievable character. I'm a character actor; that's what you look for: outsized human beings.
An actor is here to perform. For example, if a character is a Punjabi or a Bihari, and the actor is not, doesn't mean we have to cast an actor from that region. If an actor can perform, they can portray anyone because an actor is here to try different roles.
I certainly don't like to play a bad guy. There are no bad people. It's only shades of grey. Also, I am not a great actor who can transform completely into a totally different character for a movie. I am not a trained actor.
[on playing Walter] It was wonderful to be able to play a character who had so many colors and who was able to play comedy, to play incredibly vulnerable, which he did a lot of the time, to play the love story, and to play the relationship with the son, which is quite unusual. That's a gift to me, as an actor. It was like everything you could possibly hope for, over five years. So, I was a very lucky actor.
One of the fun things as an actor is to find a character that if you were to look up a rap sheet about them, you might say, 'I don't really necessarily want to hang out with this guy' or 'I would never be this kind of guy in my life.' I think it's part of an actor's job to say, 'Maybe you could be.'
I've never thought of myself as a classic leading man. I'm a character actor who happens to play leading roles. Come on, look at me. I'm really Desperate Dan.
I’d like to be the kind of actor who is remembered for my character. You know how there are cases where even when you watch all the way through the end of a drama, you remember the actor’s name, not the character’s. I want my character’s name to be more remembered than mine.
I want to play a character that is cold. I think there are sides of me that are like that. I'm a fan of the actor Edward Norton, and if you see his early works, he plays a lot of those roles.
Frequently over the years, people have thought that they know me. Every character actor has this story, I'm sure. It goes like this: 'Um, do you play soccer?' 'Did you go to such and such church?' 'I knew you when you were with so and so... ' Then I go, 'Well, sorry...' and then they say, 'Wait a minute. Are you an actor?'
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.
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