"I love playing strange characters. Some people might say it has something to do with a hidden part of myself, but I think it's because I'm intrigued by them"

An artist’s love for “strange” characters is often pathologized as masked autobiography, yet the confession is more pragmatic and generous: curiosity drives the work. The statement reframes acting not as exposure therapy but as investigation. Intrigue is the engine of attention, and attention is the actor’s finest tool. By choosing the eccentric, she chooses a wider field of human possibility, a space where habits have not hardened into clichés and where observation can still surprise.

“Strange” here is less about freakishness than about angles, idiosyncratic rhythms, ornate defenses, unlikely desires. Such figures challenge an actor to listen closely, invent specifically, and build coherent inner logic where others see chaos. Comedy thrives in that tension, but so does compassion. Playing the oddball can reveal the social rules most people accept without noticing; the outsider’s edges trace the outline of the norm.

The claim subtly resists the biographical reading audiences impose on performers. Instead of collapsing the boundary between self and role, it honors craft: the work is to understand, not to confess. Curiosity allows an actor to treat difference as something to be mapped rather than mined for personal validation. That stance protects both performer and character, replacing exposure with stewardship.

There is also an ethical generosity in being “intrigued by them.” It suggests a willingness to dignify characters who could be dismissed or mocked. The task becomes to locate their private logic, the kernel of truth under the eccentric costume. When done well, the result isn’t a parade of quirks but an invitation to empathy: the audience recognizes fragments of themselves in the very traits they first labeled strange.

Ultimately, the attraction to oddity is an aesthetic choice and a moral one. Curiosity broadens range, deepens humor, and reveals humanity’s crooked symmetry. The actor becomes a translator of the unfamiliar, less mirror, more magnifying glass.