Happy Birthday, Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman! (21 February 1946)

Happy Birthday, Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman! (21 February 1946)

“It’s the actor’s old, old plea — don’t fence me in! There are qualities of the sick, the selfish, the manipulator or the looker-on in all those parts but their minds extend in wildly different areas and they each have a particular vulnerability that has to be found. You play one of those parts [‘villains’] remotely successfully and before you know it you’ve got this label around your neck. And a label is not how I see myself at all. I’m as neurotic as the next person when it comes to being asked constantly to produce qualities which actually have nothing to do with you. One longs for a director with a sense of imagination rather than being filed away under ‘blond, uptight’ or ‘dark, sulky’ or whatever. The aim is never to generalize. That’s your job [as an actor], really. It’s about seeing [a character] in three dimensions as much as possible. If you can’t see him in three dimensions — and you can’t, always, certainly in the movies — then it’s about dealing in as much ambiguity as possible, so the audience has their own relationship with the character. It’s about pulling the rug out from people’s preconceptions. See if you can write an entire article without using the words ‘villain’ or ‘bad guy’ once. I don’t see any of [my characters] as one word. It doesn’t matter what I’m playing: it’s not one word, and I think any actor would say the same.”

ethan: what exactly are you doing?

y/n, standing on the bed: i live here and i can do whatever i wa-

grayson: where’s the spider?

y/n: on the desk, please save me