Love Quote by Glenn Close

Acting, Glenn Close suggests, isn’t an exercise in likability; it’s an act of radical empathy under hostile conditions. “You have to love the characters you play” reads like a private rule she’s turned into a public ethic: the performer’s job is not to flatter the audience’s moral instincts, but to commit to a person from the inside out. That word “have to” is doing the heavy lifting. It’s not sentimental advice, it’s survival language - a requirement if you want to make a character feel real rather than reduced to a cautionary poster.

The kicker is the clause that follows: “even if no one else does.” Close has spent a career inhabiting women viewers aren’t always encouraged to “love”: controlling, ambitious, cold, furious, inconveniently intelligent. The line quietly pushes back against a culture that confuses affection with virtue and punishes female characters - and actresses - for being difficult to consume. It’s also a shot across the bow at the internet-age court of public opinion, where a character can be condemned like a real person and the performer expected to apologize for portraying them too convincingly.

Subtextually, she’s arguing that the only honest way to portray darkness is without contempt. If an actor plays a villain as a villain, the performance shrinks; if they play them as the hero of their own story, the audience gets something rarer: discomfort with purpose. Close isn’t asking us to approve. She’s insisting the work begin before approval is even on the table.