Interior vs Exterior

When you think of characters who have played in movies, are they actually characters or just characterizations? For example take a character like Jet Li, in most of his movies, I think hes playing a characterization of you to survive knowing martial arts such as other cliches in martial arts movies. In class we discussed that characters will express if they are active or passive, antagonist vs protagonist, the interior. Characterization are just cliches of what characters truly are. So the next time you go to watch a movie, see if you can tell the difference between characters and characterizations.