Gordon Brown is a character from a tragic opera, twisted by ambition and a Presbyterian sense of fateful destiny. He has waited 13 years, mostly in Tony Blair's shadow, for this poisoned chalice and has a pessimist's luck.
A. A. Gill
I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.
A. B. Yehoshua
As an actor, the ambition is to play interesting characters. And in the indie genre world, the budgets are low. That allows me, as an actor, not to have a financial value behind my name, to justify me being in these bigger parts for these types of movies.
A. J. Bowen
A lot of cable television is shot on a single camera. Our eyes are more trained to that. It takes the camera off the crane, away from observing the action, to becoming a character in the story along with everyone else. People are getting used to that.
Teaching is a very noble profession that shapes the character, caliber, and future of an individual. If the people remember me as a good teacher, that will be the biggest honour for me.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
Where there is righteousness in the heart, there is beauty in the character. When there is beauty in the character, there is harmony in the home. When there is harmony in the home, there is order in the nation. When there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world.
One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.
I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.
A. S. Byatt
I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.
I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.
I'm involved in some action scenes, so they'll train me for that. I'll be working with my acting coach to prepare for my character.
Aaliyah
When I prepare for a role, I try to get inside the character's head and understand him.
Aamir Khan
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.
Aaron Douglas
But I guess I like playing flawed guys 'cause it gives a place for the characters to go.
Aaron Eckhart
The animators working with these 3D models, they're artists, right? They're great at what they do. They're artful in how they move characters about.
Aaron Ehasz
On 'The Dragon Prince', we wanted to push that even more to leverage the strengths of a CG and 3D pipeline. We wanted details on the character designs, in the costumes and sets, that you really can't get in traditional 2D animation.
On 'Avatar', I learned that it's worth taking some risks and doing some weird little things with characters or having an off-joke here and there, even if it's only for 5 percent of the audience.
The characters don't all have to be likable, and they don't all have to be hateable. As long as it's interesting and you connect to them and they resonate with you and you want to find out what happens and it feels authentic, then we have something.
We have a writing process that's very much you try to create the character in a complicated way and then you let the story lead you to discovering who the character is in a natural way.
For 'A Little Night Music,' I did try to get little bit more beefed up for that because I thought that would help me carry myself around the stage in that character.
Aaron Lazar
I always try to make each character my own.
I got spoiled on 'Breaking Bad.' Playing the same guy for four or five seasons, you get to really explore who the character is.
I never really thought of myself as being an action hero or a leading man or any of that. I'm a character actor.
I'm a character actor.
I consider myself absolutely a character actor, and that's what I want as a career. I don't need to be the lead star or any of that, as long as I'm doing stuff that I'm proud of, really.
It's so hard for me to kind of fall in love with comedy, but if something comes my way... I mean, I loved 'Weird,' I thought that was a really fun character.
I always gravitate towards characters that are so opposite of me.
Authenticity is everything! You have to wake up every day and look in the mirror, and you want to be proud of the person who's looking back at you. And you can only do that if you're being honest with yourself and being a person of high character. You have an opportunity every single day to write that story of your life.
With the work that I do as a director, I've got dialogue, camera movement, and character blocking to help create a tone to the piece. In photography, those elements are somewhat void so that tone becomes a bit more subtle but still equally important.
I'm more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But 'Steve Jobs' and 'The Social Network' have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that.
The properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other. They really don't. I know it seems like they do because we look alike, but people don't speak in dialogue. Their lives don't unfold in a series of scenes that form a narrative arc.
If the characters on 'The West Wing' were watching a TV show wherein a character like Trump was leading in the polls, they wouldn't find it believable.
A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing - when words won't do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern.
I do not speak through my characters; it's not a ventriloquist act.
The show is '12 Monkeys,' and I'm playing the role that Bruce Willis played in the original film '12 Monkeys.' It is a show about time travel. My character is from a future post-apocalypse, and he has been given a mission to go back in time to essentially set things right and stop the apocalypse. No big deal.
That's just part of being in 'X-Men.' There's, like, 20 main characters, and 15 of them are household names, so obviously you're happy for anything you can get.
I've been recognized very seldom. I think I just look different in person than I do as the character.
I try to pick characters that I find interesting and complex and that I feel I can bring something of myself to.
You always take a little bit back with you at the end of the day. I always put a little bit of myself into the characters, too. You find parallels, points of connection, things like that. But I'm not an actor who gets so incredibly haunted by my characters that I can't come back.
Bruce Dern was fascinating. He's an amazing character. If you put him in a room at a table, you will sit there for the next five days and listen to everything he has to say and be fascinated by it. He's great.
I'm sure some of the characters in 'X-Men' had a lot of physically demanding stuff to do, but my character's pretty much stand-and-deliver, stand there and throw fire at people. There's no acrobatics or anything.
Matt Weiner is very perceptive; there's something about the rhythms and the way people speak that is very authentic to the actor. But there are qualities that are dissimilar. The characters on 'Mad Men' are struggling with pretty profound unhappiness, but I can tell you this is a happy bunch.
I want to work with great directors. I've picked films based on the script or the character and seen them collapse because the directors were not strong visionaries.
People lament that there's no roles being written for South Asian or Muslim characters. But their parents don't want their children to go into the entertainment field. You don't get it both ways.
Being American and being an outsider at the same time, it's a perspective I often bring to a character.
The pleasure from acting comes from having great writing to work with. If it's well written and the character is interesting, then, as an actor, that's the raw material I need.
I did a play called 'Disgraced' in 2012 at Lincoln Center, which ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize. I played the lead character, a Muslim American, who had renounced Islam and became very anti-Islam.
I've been watching 'The Cosby Show' and 'Roseanne' a lot right now, and those work so well because they're not, like, jokey comedies; they are coming from real characters. We want our show to be like that. A family show.
I would love to be at a place where a girl character can also be a role model for young boys.
I recently saw this home video where my brother is playing this character Arsenio Grimley, who is a mix of Arsenio Hall and Ed Grimley - which, clearly, is my parents' doing, because he's, like, 10. He's the host, I'm every guest, and then my dad is Elton John. That was a Saturday night.
