A lot of times, I feel like people come up to me because they think I'm like my character in 'Easy A', or because they've seen me in interviews, but really what they're a fan of is a movie or a character.
You have to always try to think about them like real people first, and not just heroes. They have to be real characters. As people do more and more superhero stuff, the characters are what distinguish it, just like in cop shows.
It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.
When you're doing a play that's fully produced, you have the benefit of rehearsing for four or five weeks, so you really get to live in the skin of the character for much longer than when you first start doing a character on TV.
I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors.
Sometimes when you're playing a very intense character, a disturbed character, you find other layers. That's much more interesting to me, rather than just playing 'intense.' I find it too boring.
The law of harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.
In Halloween, I viewed the characters as simply normal teenagers. Laurie, Jamie Lee's character, was shy and somewhat repressed. And Michael Myers, the killer, is definitely repressed. They have certain similarities.
When you do a play, or even a movie, you have weeks to finesse your character. You really understand why they do what they do. In TV, you get new material weekly about your character.
I think you have to find the humanity in the character and then the deterioration is a part of the process - the journey of the character. It's like playing King Lear. You can start off as a nice old man who finishes up crazy.
Essentially and most simply put, plot is what the characters do to deal with the situation they are in. It is a logical sequence of events that grow from an initial incident that alters the status quo of the characters.
Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.
The characters that have greys are the more interesting characters. The hero who sometimes crosses the line and the villain who sometimes doesn't are just much more interesting.
I've always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they're still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.
When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel.
Specifically, we talked about making the character of the prince not so charming, at least in the beginning, and I'm playing around with the preconceptions attached to a character. That's really what intrigued me as well because I thought it would be...
I like coming up with new characters. Whether it's revamping an old character no one likes or just coming up with brand-new stuff, that's kind of what excited me as an artist.
I'd like to make character-based dramas. I end up writing thrillers a lot - these psychological character-based things with weird people doing horrible things to each other - coming to a theatre near you!
The you that you think of as you (and that thinks of you as you, and so on) is not you, it’s just the character that the underlying truth of you is dreaming into existence. Enlightenment isn’t in the character, it’s in the underlying truth.
Each instrument has something to say to you. It's got its own character. Each horn has its own character and will say to you certain things. If you violate that, it's almost a sacrilege!
Characters can become boring. That's what's tricky about television. It goes on and on - you're playing this same character for five seasons and it gets easy to fall into just walking on the set and assuming you know how to play a scene.
