Kevin Spacey Character Quotations

Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.

Audiences grew to like this duality of feeling, where you're both championing a character and you're revolted by them.

The less you know about me, the easier it is to convince you that I am that character on screen.

It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way.

I mean we all played as kids. You play games, you take on different characters, you imitate; the fun and the love of play has never left me.

Cable TV has become where the best actors, writers and directors have gone to work because they are allowed to do character-driven stories.

Games are advancing in terms of storytelling and trying to create a character, and its a brand new audience for me.

Have we become so celebrity-obsessed that there is no longer a difference between a character and an actor? I hope not.

There are times when you do a play when you are living in the character over a two-and-a-half-hour period or longer, and you come to the end of the night, and you can feel like you were hit by a truck.

Audiences grew to like this duality of feeling, where youre both championing a character and youre revolted by them.

The less you know about me the easier it is to convince you that I'm the character on screen.

I'm a relatively ugly character who's done pretty damn well in film.

Im able to hang up the character with the costume at the end of the movie.

I dont categorize characters into one syllable. These are fully-rounded characters that I dont judge; I just play them.

Sometimes you walk away from playing somebody and you think, "Wow that was far as from my own experience as I can possibly be." And sometimes you walk away thinking, "Wow. There are qualities in that character that I didn't realize I had." And those can be both interesting and uncomfortable.

It's the way I feel about acting. That we are given clues by a writer about someone's essence or persona and it's our job to try to figure out which of those clues are true, which of clues we decide to follow and which of those clues we think are red herrings, or only in the way another character thinks of that character.

I think that there is no doubt that every experience you have in your life, whether it's playing a character or something else, you bring that to the work.

The characters created cannot just be a mouthpiece for the writer. When you look at a piece of writing, and it's genuine and it doesn't feel like every character is just a mouthpiece for the writer, but that they've been created in such a way that they're expressing an idea that a writer wants to get across, that's when a story succeeds.

I can't judge the characters I play, because it's for the audience to do. What I can try to do is to understand and embody what were they going through? How did they make the decisions they made? That to me is a more interesting way to approach something, rather than saying this person is a villain and that person is this and - because it's not very interesting to play that anyway.