With mockumentaries, the conceit is that the characters are being interviewed, so you can start a scene and cut to a character looking at the camera and saying, "I'm working on this project," instead of having to figure out ways for people to talk naturally about what they're doing. You see this problem in pilots - people end up explaining things to each other that they'd never explain in real life.
It's so much easier to write for an actor than for an imaginary character and then try to fit that character to an actor. It doesn't work very often in my experience.
I find Billy Eichner to be hilarious, though I also imagine that for many, a little goes a long way. Billy provides a kind of comedy the Parks and Recreations show did not have - an insane person screaming at everyone, and our job going forward, as it is with all of our characters, is to develop him and make him more three dimensional.
I would far rather add a character who generates strong feelings than someone who just kind of floats along, generating medium-warmth smiles of gentle affirmation.
I think one of the most destructive things in terms of American security has been for all of our leaders, without exception in both parties, to identify Osama bin Laden as a gangster or as a madman, as an apocalyptic character who's out to destroy our civilization.
I liked the idea that if something horrible was happening to one of the characters in the mental hospital, no one would believe them. The staff would just chalk it up to them being crazy. So it gives me a lot to work with.
When you're playing this bad of a character, it's obviously not reality for someone who's not living that life.
I work very hard on finding good characters who can explain things to me, and I use them to help tell the story. I organize my pieces not just around people but around animals and plants, energy flows, the path that carbon takes through the food system.
I needed to stay in the character.
The jokes I used to do on 'Sex and the City' were always comic character things, and they were rarely hard jokes. As soon as you go up in front of people, it demands laughter.
Every character when born is a stereotype.
When you find you don't like a character, you just type four letters and he's dead.
I'd got over playing a character. People accepted who I was, and if I was incompetent and useless, they felt quite endeared to me.
She moved from being a young woman into having the angular look of a queen, someone who has made her face with her desire to be a certain kind of person. He still likes that about her. Her smartness, the fact that she did not inherit that look or that beauty, but it was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character.
I much prefer to watch actors and writers create "humanizing" moments for characters. In a drama, "humanizing" is far more impactful and powerful than "redeeming."
This word "redemption," what is it about this word? Is it tangible? Do you know when it has happened? Is it necessary in a drama? Does it make a character boring? Does everyone agree on a character being "redeemed?" Or is it a word that is so subjective and polarizing and insignificant in modern television? It is a word that has been given, quite possibly, far too much significance, when it is truly ambiguous and meaningless in a drama. I have personally grown to loathe that word in literature.
Health messages are simply overwhelmed, in volume and in effectiveness, by junk-food ads that often deploy celebrities or cartoon characters to great effect. We may know that eating fruits and vegetables is good for us, but the preponderance of the signals we get - and especially the signals children get - push us in the direction of junk food.
As an actor, you have to be able to take all sides as well. You have to at least be able to understand things. No bad guy looks in the mirror every morning and says, boy, I'm gonna be a real bad guy this morning. He goes after his own what he's after, just like us good guys. You kind of have to take a stand and, a lot of times, you have to take the writer's stand or the stand of the character this writer has created.
I love being presented a character that boggles my mind. I have to do a lot of work and explore how I can make the guy absolutely real and absolutely believable to myself. And then, I go to work on doing that for other people.
When you play a character that's someone real, when you're playing a true story, it's really great, 'cause you're not pretending to make up some silly thing.
You know, it's hard as a writer to lose characters (and actors) you like. You really don't want them to die because you're not going to get to see them anymore.
What's fun is watching actors of that calibre bring them to life. It's incredible. Christian Bale spent a day with the character he plays and after my year of being with him I couldn't have generated the same view of him. They have a different way of looking at people, it's fascinating to watch.
My characters are actually usually pretty smart and admirable.
In terms of characters I wish I had created - just because I haven't dealt with anything like them - I'm really impressed by characters who can endure over time, whether that be a long series run like a Harry Bosch, or a character who endures over generations and continues to please readers: Sherlock Holmes.
I'm totally comfortable today with the success that Omar and 'The Wire' have brought me - living with that character, being recognized and remembered for that character.
