Philip Kerr Quotes

I don't like to play characters that are too perfect.

I'm very drawn to characters who are very flawed. I'm less interested in characters who are just good or bad, because to me then they're not real people.

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

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.

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

I don't know anyone who's 100 percent pure - nor do I have any interest in portraying anyone like that.

Fallible characters are more interesting than superheroes in the end.

All my characters are quite relatable, as they are flawed, true, and honest. All of us are flawed; nobody is pure and pious.

I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.

I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.

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.

I love to feature children and young adults as real people - flawed, naive, virtuous, venal - but real. I think it adds nuance and depth to the stories that wouldn't exist without them.

I think I like playing the bad girl. I like complicated. I like flawed, messed up complicated. It's more interesting.

Perfect heroes are cool, but no one can really empathize or identify with them.

We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people with the rough edges sanded off that I can't connect to because they just don't resonate with me.

I try to write about real women, real people - in other words flawed characters.

I'm interested in people that don't always do the right thing, its much more akin to what I know about life.

You don't want to play a perfect person; no one cares about that.

The characters I've always been drawn to are real and flawed. That's not how women have always been portrayed.

Antiheroes who are sort of honest to themselves are the ones you root for. Like, Barry Seal isn't trying to be anything other than he is. He isn't fooling anybody per se.

There's this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I've never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I'm certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We're human beings.

We've never been squeaky-clean from the jump. We've never been Disney or Sesame Street, you know.

There's something really charming about a character that is fundamentally flawed and does some pretty despicable things, but yet you still kind of love him.

I let characters be human and flawed and relatable.