Nick Earls Quotes

The thing that I like about the way characters are written on the show these days is that nobody's perfect. Everyone has made a lot of mistakes and bad choices.

I choose grey characters, as I enjoy playing a human character. I don't shy away from showing the shortcomings of my characters.

It works better if your lead character is complex and interesting and not perfect.

As a reader, I much prefer to read a book where people embody all kinds of ideas and everybody is making mistakes.

Do I want a character who just has the best motives and the best intentions, zero flaws, and is doing things for the right reasons? No!

The truth is that, to me, a likeable character is a character that is really flawed, so I don't know what people mean when they say 'likable.'

I'm interested in flawed protagonists. I was raised on them.

I'm attracted to playing characters that have flaws.

I love it when you like a character, and then she does something you don't like, and you hate her for a while - then you love her again. I'd like to see her have unlikable moments that the audience understands and sympathizes with.

I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.

All of my characters are less than perfect.

I work very hard at creating complex characters, a mix of positives and negatives. They are all flawed. I believe flaws are almost universal, and they help us understand, sympathise and, paradoxically, feel closer to such characters.

If you can make a character likable that's not very nice, that's the challenge of the job.

I know myself - I cannot just play a cliche. It has to be a character; it has to be written with the complexity of the human being behind. Could be bad, could be good, could be someone we would hate, but still, I need a reason for that influence, and I need to understand why.

I don't want a perfect character, I want a character who has, as strange as it sounds, some humanity, some flaws, some needs.

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 like playing flawed characters, people who aren't perfect.

I think any character has to be well-rounded, whether they are male or female - they have to be complex and make choices that maybe we don't agree with, you know? I guess that's what makes them human.

You have to be careful so you don't make your character dull and predictable. Sometimes you have to bend the script a little... The bad guys are mostly the same on the paper... A bad guy wouldn't think of himself as bad.

This high-end, novelistic form of TV, you know, is just peppered with despicable people who do marvelous things and marvelous people who do despicable things.

Of course I know my characters are unlikable sometimes or have prejudices. It's not as if I'm thinking they're so endearing all the time. I guess it's much more interesting to me to write someone who is a combination of good and bad qualities because that's what people are like in real life.

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.

I've never read a script in which you are actively pulling for the protagonist in the beginning, but little by little, you lose that.

It's very hard to play a man without any flaws.

I like the characters that have some redeeming quality or if it's interesting to me in any way.