James Frain Quotations

I don't keep a record of the parts I've played, and I don't compare characters, but maybe I should? I could construct a graphic that grades badness and madness levels? Interesting idea.

I was watching the last season of 'Mad Men,' and they're now so in their characters and they're so comfortable in their characters, and they're doing such good work. That can only happen from doing it over and over, and developing a character over seven years.

Now it's all about the word of mouth, and watching a series on Netflix. That's the way people actually consume this stuff now, instead of waiting for a DVD release you're not really sure you want to buy. And I think it's fantastic, because then I can watch the shows that I missed, over a weekend. I love doing that.

Sometimes it's fun to be the guy who doesn't know that he's bad, like the character I played in 'True Blood'.

I've got this thing where I think great shows have great credit sequences. I don't know why that is, exactly.

'The Cape' is a really good comic! They invented the whole character, and now they've built a book of 'The Cape' for the show. When I was a kid, I used to love Batman, and I loved Spider-Man. My favorite was this guy called Judge Dredd. I know they made a movie of that in the '90s.

Characters who have some kind of free rein on their darker selves are always fun because they've taken the license off. You just get to fill out all the colors.

'The Buccaneers' was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.

Bruges is a beautiful medieval city almost untouched by time. If you like jazz, you will be well catered for. If you like chocolate and beer, you will be in heaven.

As movies and TV projects come up, they go out to the agents, and we just go out and audition for them.

Forney in Where the Heart Is has more fans than any other character Ive played.

Acting isn't something that I think about very consciously, somehow that just doesn't work for me. I just kind of feel my way into it.

The Buccaneers was an Edith Wharton novel, and she never finished it, and a screenwriter adapted it for television.

X-Files wasnt a big show in England.

Cable series have more time to focus on characters, and a structure that allows for a development in character as you go along. Network shows have a pressure of time and space that is completely different.

I'm not particularly an expert on the genre. Correct me if I'm wrong, but usually you see most of the super-villain in his villainous role. He's the Green Goblin, or whatever various bad guys in Batman, or something like that. It's the excessive, larger than life, cartoon-ish, costumed character that is the personification of evil and has to be destroyed.

The acting in Downton Abbey has been consistently excellent across the board.

And sometimes it's fun to be the guy who just really enjoys it, like the guy I'm playing now on The Cape. He's more that. He's much more flashy and debonaire and devil may care-ish. He just loves doing bad in the world. That's real fun to do.

Evil is a broad church. There are so many different ways to be evil. Sometimes it's fun to be the guy who doesn't know that he's bad, like the character I played in True Blood. He was pretty angsty about it, but he thought he was doing the right thing.

I would want to keep that in a little glass sphere, perhaps in the corner of my living room, lit up. But, I think that's an extremely expensive rig. The costumes were crazy expensive, beyond anything they could afford to give you, to take away. They're going to be in a museum of some kind, on display until they get the go for Tron: Legacy 2. It would have been awesome to keep, though. I don't think there was anything that they could afford to let go. I probably would have been arrested.

For all that Tron wanted to be, it ultimately had to be a fun ride for the audience and I was going to be one of the comic characters, and he was really on top of that. He was having such a good time doing it. That's my memory of it. I'd love to work with him again. I think he's great.

Working with Joe [Kosinski], definitely. I loved working with Joe. For a guy who doesn't really come from the fiction world - he comes from advertising and architecture - he's extremely easy-going and very calm. He's extremely detailed, but a very generous and fun director to work with. He really encouraged me to find the fun in the part and to have fun with it.

That was one of the things I hadn't really put together. Since the first movie and this movie, the rest of us have been living that revolution, largely engineered by people who were Tron fans. That's pretty deep, man.

You know, what I didn't know was how many people in the tech world the original movie had such an impression on. That's really interesting to me because a lot of the people who created this technological revolution that we're all living through were kids when Tron came out, and they saw Tron and it impacted them.

The costumes, the light rigs and the effects are seamlessly joined. I'm kind of bummed that I don't get the experience that you get with just watching it cold. By the time we'd seen all the visuals put together, I'd sort of become used to that world. It's still pretty impressive.

I also thought the music was a huge contribution, in terms of creating the scale of that. And, I was impressed with just how natural and fluid the world looks. The world is so artificial and it requires so much work to make all the different pieces add up together, but when it comes together, it just looks effortless. It's amazing.

I was surprised by how much of it I was in [Tron: Legacy]. I thought the character was just going to register as a smaller figure because most of what I did was with a body double, and then I would do the stand-in with Jeff [Bridges] and he would be just wearing his regular clothes.

The problem with trying to make a film good and have it work for an audience is the problem of trying to tell a story well. The shape or the color of it doesn't matter.

Working with CGI is more like doing theater where your sort of imagining things. I didn't experience it as restrictive.

I am a little in awe of Jeff Bridges. He's an actor I have admired for many years, and so I didn't know who I was going to get, in the sense that I didn't know what he was going to be like. And so I was pleasantly surprised that he is this kind of laid-back guy.

Every project has its things to be overcome, but I didn't find that there was anything particularly impossible about what we were doing - it was all quite exciting.

Working in 3D I didn't experience much of a difference, except that the cameras are very big so they can't be moved around with as much ease. It was more like, when you've seen photos of cameras from the 1930s being moved around with these huge cranes. So there was something quite sort of old-fashioned about it almost.

With my guy, every now and then, he puts on a mask and does that, but he isn't that. Most of the time that we see him, he isn't that. Most of the time that we see him, he's fun to hang around with. I think that's unusual, to that extent.