Judith Tarr Quotes

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

Whenever I have tried to make a character bad, they end up being good 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.

I always say the classier cousin of 'Anchorman' is 'Mad Men,' because when you really look at it, why do people really love Don Draper in 'Mad Men?' He's just a terrible guy. But we know why he's terrible, and I think that's really key to why you can be sympathetic to a character.

I'm drawn to the classic antihero, the guy who's probably made a bunch of mistakes and really has the capacity to go either way. That's the most interesting type of character for me to watch, to see what decisions they'll make. There's a lot of gray area there for a writer to explore.

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 have been thinking a lot about what we see in villains, how we relate to villains, and what it is about certain villains that we actually empathize with. Like Macbeth. We're not supposed to like a guy who kills the king and takes over, but there's something about him we're really fascinated by.

I tend to always love material with flawed protagonists and morally ambiguous people.

I like movies that make you semi fall in love with the villain so you have sympathy for him.

It's really interesting to play someone you wouldn't want to ever spend more than a couple of drinks with - but who has redeemable characteristics.

I love the character of Jaime Lannister. He's just so complex - a character that we love to hate - but it's a lot more complex than hatred. It starts off, and he seems so arrogant and so smug.

I love playing bad. But my whole thing is usually villains that don't know that they're evil.

Sometimes there is more exploration in the character for a villain.

The bad guys are not typical; they are not just bad, they are interesting. They might be good or bad.

In general, I think writing characters, no one is 100 percent good or bad, and certainly, the bad characters never think they're bad themselves. Even the worst characters don't feel like they're bad guys on the inside.

I think 'Scarface' is a great film, but if you have a character like Tony Montana, you don't identify with him at all. I think it's very interesting instead to identify yourself with a character you don't like all the time. You can create a tension between the fiction and the viewer. You force the spectator to wonder about his actions.

The beauty of the characters on 'Justified' is that all the human beings that are written are all flawed. Even with the good guys, you see darkness surface.

I've always been interested in the antihero myself.

I don't know what it is that I do, but when I play a really bad guy, I'm able to bring some level of likability to it.

I think conflicted characters are always more interesting.

'Deathstroke' became an interesting challenge - not just because of his ethnicity, but because he's a villain. I've never written a villain as a protagonist of a series before. I thought this could be an interesting challenge. That's really what got my attention, and it just went from there.

The anti-hero walks the morally gray path and constantly flirts with redemption, and that flirtation is just a blast to write.

I think the parts that I played sort of broke the mould in terms of - you know, I played grey characters, the bad girl with a good heart, there was a good reason for her to be bad.

Elektra isn't a villain and isn't a good girl, but as Frank Miller said, she is one of the villains with a weak streak in them, and that's a failure that I tried to explore.

The anti-hero or hero usually has a journey or quest so they are interesting as you find out what's going to happen, what they are looking for. What are they trying to do? Sometimes what they do is heroic or comes with a price or sacrifice or maybe the way they do things isn't so great and that's when they become anti-heroes. But the journey of an anti-hero combined with a good story done well is always worthwhile.