Tom Ellis Quotes

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

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.

It's interesting sometimes when an audience can empathize with a villain.

I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do.

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

I'm more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But 'Steve Jobs' and 'The Social Network' have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that.

At the end of the day, what I try to bring to villainous characters is a sense of humanity.

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.

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.

Part of what I like about the best villains in TV and film is when you feel sorry for them, and that makes you feel even worse for feeling guilty about wanting them to succeed, in some way.

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

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

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

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.

I am really drawn to damaged characters, and I have a lot of sympathy for them. Making those complicated characters empathetic is something to strive for. It's too easy to create a good guy or a good girl.

For 'Breaking Bad,' people were with Walter White for 99% of that show, even though that guy is a monster.

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

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 don't really like heroes who always behave heroically. That's not interesting to me.

I like characters who have faults. I'm drawn to darker people.

That's sort of what I like about this character is that he's not the good guy, he's not truly the bad guy.

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.

I've always been interested in the antihero myself.

In general, I am more interested in the darker characters when I watch or read stories.

I'm very glad people love 'Breaking Bad,' but the harder character to write is the good character that's as interesting and as engaging as the bad guy.