I like to have fun with my videos and performances, that's the most fun part when it comes to the music. I get to show off my character.
The only way I know how to do something, as cheesy as it sounds, is to become that character, and it affects me in a not so healthy way.
How do you project a character if you don't have a sense of where she is from? I've always just gotten on a plane to go to the area to get a sense of what it is like, to smell it, feel the earth, hear people talk, go to the marketplaces.
Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.
I think the more experience I have working on films, the more I can shed that character rather than carrying around that heavy weight.
After 'Kong,' my knuckles have never recovered because I had to wear very heavy weights on my forearms and around my hips and ankles to get the sense of size and scale of the movement of the character... You are telling your body that you are these things and that you're feeling these thoughts and that you're experiencing these experiences.
A defining reality for me is what Scripture teaches in Hebrews 12, that God is our father, and that a sign that he loves us is that he disciplines us, he takes us through hardship to build character in us that could not be shaped apart from difficulty.
I love Helena Bonham Carter because every character that she portrays, she's just something completely different. And she has that quirky factor that she just owns.
He may not have been a good actor, and I personally don't think he was a good president, but I'll tell you this: Ronald Reagan was a helluva character.
Herbert Hoover was a man of genuine, fine character, but he lacked practical political sense. And he couldn't bend and shift and change with the requirements of the time. And he was a ruined President, because he was such a, I think, stiff-backed ideologue. And I think that speaks volumes about his character.
For 'Hercules,' I went for the demigod look: big and mean. When you're playing a character like the son of Zeus, you only get one shot.
He's meant to be that classic Homer, Ulysses, Hercules - a character who goes out or has some gift of some kind. He goes on a journey of discovery and part of that is falling into darkness - the temptations of life.
It's good sometimes to have a character that starts as one thing and ends as another, but James Bond, Hercules, these are pretty enduring stories.
I think that always makes it fun, trying to create a heroic character and putting your own twist on it and injecting your own personality into it.
In most films - especially in regards to the protagonist - really from the get-go they set up some scenario that endears that character to the audience. Or imbues him with some nobility or heroism or something.
Even on your hiatus, you feel like you need to keep the character in the back of your brain.
How often does one get to have a 20-year hiatus of a character and then come back as an adult?
I like to work as much as I can, but I only really have the hiatus to work on other projects. I've kept myself busy recently. I voiced a character in 'Ice Age 4,' which was a lot of fun. I also did another small movie called 'The Scribbler.'
I started off doing theater as a kid, and I always played a character. I hid behind the script and was told where to go. But to actually perform as yourself is very difficult. I didn't used to enjoy it, but now I do.
When I'm singing a song, I'm in that song, and I'm thinking about what emotions I should bring to the song. Voicing a character was very similar. It was high energy, and I had to really think about the emotion of what was going on in the scene.
