Vera Farmiga Character Quotations

When I look at female characters, I want to recognize myself in them: my trials, my tribulations as a mother, as a lover, as a daughter.

The biggest research of all when I do a character is self-examination. You look at yourself and you ask, 'How am I similar to this person and how am I different?'

I just can't feel lukewarm about a character. I either despise her, admire her, or don't understand her and want to understand her.

As an actor, you're sort of the court-appointed lawyer for the character.

The more people know about you, the more face-time you get in the media, the harder your job becomes to create a character in whom people suspend disbelief.

Just because I'm telling a story about a woman losing faith is not my rebellion against what I grew up in. If anything, it really affected the way I approached the story, and in fact, approach everything. I don't judge my characters.

I've done TV, but never where you're given this much time to live with a character, to study the tone and hone it and repair stuff, to go back and watch old episodes and go, "Oh no, that's a misstep. That's a victory. I should do more of that, less of that."

I feel my fuller-bodied characters are all in the independent films I do, and in the studio productions, I have to work harder to dimensionalize the characters. And that's certainly part of the job description of an actor - that's what you're supposed to do - but you have to work harder at it in the characters that I've encountered in studio films.

There's just a deeper level of sophistication in the writing of female characters on TV.

When you encounter sophistication in the creation of a female character, you thank the writers and you claim it.