People come up to me and say, 'You are such a great bad guy.' The fact is that the antagonist in a movie is usually the most fun to play. You can stretch the role and do so much with it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I certainly don't like to play a bad guy. There are no bad people. It's only shades of grey. Also, I am not a great actor who can transform completely into a totally different character for a movie. I am not a trained actor.
Every actor will tell you it's so much more fun to play the bad guy because usually those characters are more complex and more broad and more interesting, and have more sides to them.
It feels bad to play a bad guy. I did George W. Bush for years, and I hated him. But you have to give full voice to the villains. You have to have really convincing villains, or it's not worth anything as drama or comedy.
As the actor, you can't go in saying, 'I'm the bad guy.' You've got to think your reasons for doing what you're doing are good.
I always think that I'm the best thing in a lot of bad movies. Personally, I have to. I think that I like me as an actor.
Every time you play a bad girl or guy in a movie, you really come from a place of pain.
I did a play once where a reviewer said, 'Martin Freeman's too nice to play a bad guy.' And I thought: 'Well, bad guys aren't always bad guys, you know?' When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it's false.
It's great to be able to play the 'bad guy' role, because you always get a lot to do, but I'm always looking at the why - how does a person get to that particular point.
Well, I've always been a character actor, you know, and you always get your share of character actors who are bad guys.
As an actor, if you decide that someone is bad... you can't play bad, because even the worst person doesn't think what they're doing is bad.