Sam Esmail Quotes

I like playing flawed characters, people who aren't perfect.

I'm attracted to playing characters that have flaws.

I don't want a perfect character, I want a character who has, as strange as it sounds, some humanity, some flaws, some needs.

I don't want to watch a show or a movie about the guy who doesn't have any problems, who is sort of a goodie two shoes and just does everything morally right, because that's not the person I relate to. That's not who I am. That's not what anyone is.

I'm always much more interested in flawed heroes than in perfect ones.

All of my characters are less than perfect.

As a reader, I much prefer to read a book where people embody all kinds of ideas and everybody is making mistakes.

I find flawed characters much more interesting than perfect ones and enjoy the challenge of making readers root for them in spite of their unsympathetic path and destructive choices.

It's very hard to play a man without any flaws.

I like fractured characters with human follies.

It seems to me that most characters, in anything, are flawed in some way, just like most people. You look for the good in the flawed people and vice versa, and then try and make them appealing in some way.

People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

To me the interesting main character is never the one without flaws.

I think all of us have a hero and a villain in us.

I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

I think I am more attracted to characters with a subtext, whatever that is and they don't necessarily have to be virtuous, but they have to at least be human.

If you can write a character who is attractive but morally reprehensible, then you've got a character. It's got to feel like people I know and it doesn't just become a bag of tricks.

I love flawed characters, male or female, and I only want to talk about flawed characters, really, in what I do.

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

I am a man of many flaws and contradictions.

However, for my characters to have depth, they have to be human and complex, have both qualities and flaws, do the right things at times, and at others, things they'll regret having done and not necessarily know how to undo.

The truth is that, to me, a likeable character is a character that is really flawed, so I don't know what people mean when they say 'likable.'

I choose grey characters, as I enjoy playing a human character. I don't shy away from showing the shortcomings of my characters.

The characters are whole, real people to me that I'm getting to know, and since real people are all flawed, so are my characters, I hope.