Vera Farmiga Character Quotations

When I look at female characters, I want to recognize myself in them: my trials, my tribulations as a mother, as a lover, as a daughter.

The biggest research of all when I do a character is self-examination. You look at yourself and you ask, 'How am I similar to this person and how am I different?'

I just can't feel lukewarm about a character. I either despise her, admire her, or don't understand her and want to understand her.

As an actor, you're sort of the court-appointed lawyer for the character.

The more people know about you, the more face-time you get in the media, the harder your job becomes to create a character in whom people suspend disbelief.

When you encounter sophistication in the creation of a female character, you thank the writers and you claim it.

There's just a deeper level of sophistication in the writing of female characters on TV.

I feel my fuller-bodied characters are all in the independent films I do, and in the studio productions, I have to work harder to dimensionalize the characters. And that's certainly part of the job description of an actor - that's what you're supposed to do - but you have to work harder at it in the characters that I've encountered in studio films.

I've done TV, but never where you're given this much time to live with a character, to study the tone and hone it and repair stuff, to go back and watch old episodes and go, "Oh no, that's a misstep. That's a victory. I should do more of that, less of that."

Just because I'm telling a story about a woman losing faith is not my rebellion against what I grew up in. If anything, it really affected the way I approached the story, and in fact, approach everything. I don't judge my characters.