Peter Milligan Quotes

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.

The thing I love about Marvel in general is that they deal with people. They deal with the human being first: Who is inside the suit? Who is the person that obtained this power or this ability?

'The River Wild' was great, with Meryl Streep. That guy was really a bad dude who was ultimately sort of fundamentally impotent in a weird way. That was kind of interesting.

I think conflicted characters are always more interesting.

My dad was always interested in characters he didn't understand - he was such a great bad guy in movies. And that is really the thing that calls me to the material often: something I struggle to understand in human behaviour.

I am constantly getting letters from inconsistancies in the back stories of these characters.

Governments almost never act with moral clarity and for very good reason. They are dealing with competing interests.

When two nations have competing national identities, the solutions are either imposed though force by one side over the other or require a new conception of identity that allows for compromise.

The best strategy for making people care about what happens is if they empathize with both sides. If you just have a Villain with a capital V, it becomes very two-dimensional.

I was playing this role on 'Ugly Betty,' the sweetest, nicest guy. He was a fun character to play, but I was in a Latin soap opera - where are you gonna go with a nice guy in a Latin soap opera?

I don't think you can play a villain with a negative point of view.

Often, in books, I find female power to be cartoonish - power is a process, an evolution - it has responsibilities. It's not as simple as picking up your lightning bolt and throwing it at someone.

On occasion, a well-constructed drama can do what no reality or news program can do, what Shakespeare does brilliantly, is it can show both sides' opinions.

I'm a leading man trapped in a bad guy's body.

I've realized over the years I either play very good people or very bad people, and I think I always enjoy the very bad people more.

If your character is just out there acting a fool, viewers are gonna say, 'Why am I watching this?' But if he's whispering, 'I don't really want to die,' there's a level of vulnerability cemented in these bad characters.

Having been raised by actors who love moral ambiguity and flawed protagonists, I feel like it's sort of in the blood to want to take it on.

We tried to limit human versus human conflict only to those cases where it could be powerfully motivated and made completely believable.

You don't put your personal viewpoints in a good movie. A movie should only be concerned with characters, not some big moral, although it's always underneath.

You go back to look over the body of my work, and there are no archetypal villains in my books.

For me, it's infinitely more interesting to read or watch a character making decisions they think are right, but the audience knows differently, and seeing that disconnect. The only way characters can grow and learn is by making the wrong decisions and then learning from them.

In thinking about it, the villains often have a little bit more range because their morality is different. You can have just a really good time as an actor, and there is just more there that you can explore on that side of the story.

My hope is that each of the villains I write will have his or her own motivation that readers can understand, whether they agree or disagree.

Afghans long ago resigned themselves to this sort of thing. Compromises must be made. Deals with the devil are better than ceaseless butchery. In the exigencies of post-conflict bygones, against the threat of collapse into more terrible bloodletting, the ugliness of realpolitik is the lesser evil.

I like all of the books I work on to be ones you can pick up without knowing the entire history of the character, because then, not only can you enjoy it as is, but it encourages you to look into the history of that character and their world.