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I've played an awful lot of people that other people would call villains, but that isn't a very helpful attitude to have if you're about to play them. they are just people, and they may do dreadful things and say dreadful things, but your job as an actor is to know why they do them or say them.

-Ian Mckellen

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I've Played An Awful Lot Of People

Ian Mckellen

I've played an awful lot of people that other people would call villains, but that isn't a very helpful attitude to have if you're about to play them. they are just people, and they may do dreadful things and say dreadful things, but your job as an actor is to know why they do them or say them.

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    <p style="font-size: 1.2rem; font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 10px;">"i&#039;ve played an awful lot of people that other people would call villains, but that isn&#039;t a very helpful attitude to have if you&#039;re about to play them. they are just people, and they may do dreadful things and say dreadful things, but your job as an actor is to know why they do them or say them."</p>
    <footer style="font-size: 1rem; font-weight: bold;">— Ian Mckellen</footer>
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Jobs Attitude Play

More From Ian Mckellen

I feel like being an actor it is a great way to do your job and be a parent, because you have a lot of freedom. you have a job and then the job ends and than maybe you don't have another job for a while or maybe you chose not have another job for a while. for an actor, it's like maybe you don't see your kid for two weeks while you are filming but then you might have three months off where you are at home every day and picking him up from school. i find it's a great thing.

The only tool we have as artists is selectivity. if you're a painter, you select the color, the lines, how severe they should be. as an actor you develop how angry you should be. you select how angry you should be. you listen to the other actor and then you react. in film, sometimes the other actor isn't even there. you have to play the scene. what i do is i call on my experience on the stage. i play the scene and i hope that i reach a certain level of integrity because that's what i learned on the stage.

Work with good directors. without them your play is doomed. at the time of my first play, i thought a good director was someone who liked my play. i was rudely awakened from that fantasy when he directed it as if he loathed it. . . . work with good actors. a good actor hears the way you (and no one else) write. a good actor makes rewrites easy. a good actor tells you things about your play you didn't know.

I love playing all kinds of roles. i hope it doesn’t sound too pretentious, but i always feel human nature is like a piano, and there are 88 keys, and there are some white keys and some black keys, and each character is a different chord on the piano. basically, i hope that in the course of my life, i will have played all 88 keys. so, i’ll have played heroes and villains and princes and kings and warriors and beggars and thieves and lovers and fathers and wizards and all of those things. that is why i’m an actor… i love studying people.

Playing villains is very liberating because unlike the leading man, nothing is expected of you. leading men have to look good, they have to behave in a certain way, they have to fulfill an audience's expectations. but as a bad guy, you have free license to take the audience by surprise. and that's what audiences want - they want unpredictability from their villains. the villain's job is to subvert it.

Villains can often be one note and i would say in that case, it’s not fun to play the villain. it’s fun to play the villain if he a) has dimension and b) the villain gets to do all the things in the movie that in life he would get punished for. in the movie, you’re applauded for them if you do them with panache. and so that’s why it’s more fun to play the villain.

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