Peter Milligan Quotes

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

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.

I feel like life is much greater than a hero or a villain: there's good people that sometimes make mistakes.

Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.

Good guy' or 'bad guy', hero or anti hero; doesn't matter to me, what role I play, only the character have something magical.

I don't think most people are all heroic or all villainous, so I find ambiguity of motivations to be a natural human condition.

Operas elucidate, in a way sometimes absent in other theatrical productions, the very human fact that in every hero, there is a thread of duplicity. In every villain, there is another side to consider: We don't have to like him or her, but we are compelled to think about motivation.

I thought that would be kind of cool, to make a bad guy look sympathetic.

Life is not simple, and people can't be boxed into being either heroes or villains.

The older I get the more I realize there's no real good guys or real bad guys, and I'm curious about how the good guys got good and how the bad guys got bad.

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

I don't want to play a bad guy who doesn't have a bit of good in him.

A lot of the time, a moral compass is all that separates a hero from being a villain; otherwise, the two are very much the same. Both are generally the richest and most complex characters, and they get to have all the fun. I guess it's those types of roles that I ultimately gravitate towards.

I have a tendency to think that when you portray baddies in movies, they come out more human than good guys.

I like ambiguity because you may be the villain in someone else's story and the hero in your own, and I think very often, African-American characters are either one thing or the other. You shouldn't have to be perfectly good or perfectly bad. You don't even have to be magical.

I look forward to parts that have a dimension or depth to them. This makes it interesting for me to do and the audience to watch. Whether he's a chocolate boy die hard romantic or a gangster with swag, every good has a little bad and every bad has a little good in them.

On the other side, if Im playing a good guy, then he has some problems too. Thats what makes people interesting, in life and in fiction.

I do like to explore evil characters in my books.

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

A character on screen that's the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy,' they're never interesting. There's got to be an internal struggle, the duality is important to find.

The thematic bucket of vomit that I've been chained to since I was about 9 is the moral complexity of anti-heroism. I have always been interested in good people who do bad things for understandable reasons.

In any story, the villain is the catalyst. The hero's not a person who will bend the rules or show the cracks in his armor. He's one-dimensional intentionally, but the villain is the person who owns up to what he is and stands by it.

I don't necessarily prefer playing villains. I know a lot of people say they are more fun, but if the scriptwriter has done their work well, you can find something realistic in a villain and find the mistakes in a hero - it's all down to the writing.

I tend to look for the good in bad people and the bad in good people, to make them human. 'Cause I don't think that people generally are that black and white. Maybe in movie-land they can be... but that isn't necessarily all there is.

The nice thing about 'Farscape' is that you got to be the good guy and still do the bad guy things.