Evangeline Lilly Quotes

I don't believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don't want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as in life, most people are a mixture.

Very few of my characters are totally heroic or totally villainous.

I like to show the grey area in all my characters.

I'm always interested in what we're not being shown. So if you're playing ostensibly a quote-unquote 'baddie,' what are their good sides, and vice versa.

I love the gray area between right and wrong.

We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.

We all are who we are. We're not necessarily good, and we're not necessarily bad. So much television, in the writing, is so one-dimensional, in that aspect, where you have your good guys and you have your bad guys.

To me, most of life kind of lives in the grey and I don't just mean morally. I just mean kind of everything. If things were black and white it would be a lot clearer as to what to do all the time.

I much prefer playing the bad guys. I think they are always the most interesting characters. I liken it to painting: if you're playing the good guy, you get three colors: red, white and blue. But if you're the bad guy, you get the whole palette.

Back in the '30s, '40s and '50s, you had clear-cut heroes, clear-cut supervillains. Today, you have more of a blend, more of a gray area between the two. You have the rise of the sympathetic villain and the rise of the antihero.

The bad guys are not typical; they are not just bad, they are interesting. They might be good or bad.

I prefer to work with grey characters rather than black and white.

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.

One of the things about the '70s films I love - the films 'Nightcrawler' is being compared to, like, 'Taxi Driver' - is that they never put their flawed characters into any one box.

The old world was good guys and bad guys. The new world is gray guys.

Mike and I are always drawn to the idea that there is light and dark inside every being, rather than the old two-dimensional trope of good versus evil.

That's what attracts me to the kind of characters I try and write - that they're not cut and dried.

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 personally feel that no human is a hero or a villain. All of us have our grey sides, and that is why grey interests me: because it's more human, more life-like.

It is difficult to portray grey characters because there is a very thin line between being nasty and slightly negative.

If you break things down to goodies and baddies, the baddies are always a bit more alluring in fiction, and that's true from a narrative point of view. But I wanted to write a novel about real life, and real life is a bit more nuanced than that.

In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.

Good people can do terrible things, and that's what life is all about, the complexities and grey areas. And often characters aren't written that way in movies, especially characters for women. So you end up being either one thing or the other.

In other films and TV shows, we might say, "Well, they're just evil." In our show [Daredeval], we're trying to say, "There's bad actions, but not necessarily bad people."

I'm very, very attracted to morally ambiguous characters, not just pure bad guys or pure good guys.