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And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

Character is the essence of all that a man has seen in life and regards as high and exalted. Character is like truth: the substance of the things that a man has forgotten but the substance of the things that are worth remembering in life.

I treat all my characters as if they were real, and I am scrupulous about the details of their lives.

I think I am a pretty good judge of character in general and try to surround myself with the best people I can.

If you play a real character who's famous and still alive, it makes things easier if you have the luck to have a good relationship with them.

I think, for every actor, the most challenging part of playing a character, specially a real-life character, is to convince yourself that you are the character.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

I think what's really the most ideal thing is for the player themselves, within their own imagination, to carve out what they view as being the essence of the character.

You have to always try to think about them like real people first, and not just heroes. They have to be real characters. As people do more and more superhero stuff, the characters are what distinguish it, just like in cop shows.