Richard Madden Quotes

I got spoiled on 'Breaking Bad.' Playing the same guy for four or five seasons, you get to really explore who the character is.

In most films - especially in regards to the protagonist - really from the get-go they set up some scenario that endears that character to the audience. Or imbues him with some nobility or heroism or something.

A friend of mine who is in the publishing business knew I was writing a book, and he said, 'Have you said anything yet about the good guy? Because I know you spend so much time with the bad guys.' Because they're fun. So then you have to make the good guy fun, in order to compete. That's the challenge.

People seem to need a likable protagonist more than ever.

I still don't understand why the tag of 'action hero' follows me. My films have all these elements - romance, action and comedy. None of the fight sequences of my character is an act of randomness. There's a reason to action in my films.

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

A lot of people have asked me about some of the characters that appear in 'Clockwork Prince,' like Aloysius Starkweather and Woolsey Scott. A lot of people like Woolsey Scott, which I was really happy about because he's very fun to write.

I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks - who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on.

I don't really think of Odo as a heroic lead, but that's nice if you do.

I'd love to star in a television series of my own. I love the idea of living with a character for a number of years, watching him grow.

Perfect heroines, like perfect heroes, aren't relatable, and if you can't put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, not only will they not inspire you, but the book will be pretty boring.

I've never considered myself a leading man, don't look like one, don't want to be one.

The hero is never the star of the story.

When it comes to films, people often don't differentiate between the message of a bad central character and the message of the film itself. They are two separate things.

People always tell me I'm nothing like my character. Well, hopefully not! He's a character who's very defined. He was purposefully written by Jo Rowling as very one-dimensional in the first few books, because you're supposed to hate him.

I don't believe in anti-heroes. Duke Wayne played a mean guy but never an anti-hero.

There are a lot of techniques for developing a character.

Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

In terms of the parallels, I've never related less to a character than Riggan.

I love that everyone on 'Scream Queens' has a moment where they are the hero, and they are the villain.

I do think you need to understand a character's motivation and perspective.

With TV season structures - and I'm a huge TV watcher - you look at shows like 'Breaking Bad,' which is my favorite show of all time, and 'The Sopranos,' which is pretty high up there as well, and there was that thing where, every season, Walter White would go up a level, but there would be a new bad.