What's fun about doing a series is you get to take some time to create the character.
As actors, you don't actually need to know the future of the character. You just need to know the backgrounds.
The life of a character doesn't just exist between action and cut.
When you get a character that you're just starting to work on, it's the most exciting and most terrifying feeling because you have endless hours of diving in, researching, reading, and decision-making.
I don't concern myself with thinking ahead to the finished product. I focus more specifically on what the character is experiencing. Once you relieve yourself of the very arbitrary and always punishing pressure of what an audience is expecting you to do, acting becomes a lot more fun and pure.
Every ongoing character has to start somewhere.
The characters don't all have to be likable, and they don't all have to be hateable. As long as it's interesting and you connect to them and they resonate with you and you want to find out what happens and it feels authentic, then we have something.
I hate the analyzing thing. People say, 'Why do you think your character did that? I don't know. I'm not an analyst, and they're not in psychotherapy. Unless it's a film where they're in therapy.
There is more meat and mileage in complex characters, like 'Running with Scissors.'
I feel a lot of adult fiction looks down on plot as a lesser form of literature.
There is nothing like being able to develop a three-dimensional character over a long period of time. Sometimes you aren't able to fully portray a character because you only have a couple of scenes to do it in, and you don't get the full life and background of that character.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
You have to start from a place of trying to create a character.
I do build my own backstory as an actor. It's important to know where your characters have come from in order to know where they're going - in order to exist in that state of being.
That's kind of the fun part about acting. We do get the right to kind of get from A to Z any way we want, as long as we start at A and end at Z.
What we want to see is stories that are going to be honest stories about the characters that we're telling them about.
When I'm breaking in a character like Jessica Jones, I have this amazing opportunity to create her backstory. It's all of the work that happens before I'm ever on camera... Writing 'Bonfire' was like doing all of that fun stuff; it was like 300 pages of prep work.
I wouldn't want to play a character that knew everything and knew where to go. It is much more interesting playing a character that is vulnerable trying to be strong. It makes for better TV.
I'm not one of those actors who likes to analyze things too much, so I trust what the writers are doing with the characters, in order to give them their journey. My job is to come in and try to make those words on the page come alive on camera.
For me, it's first about the characters. I look for a character who is intriguing and challenging and different from what I've done before.
I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.
If we get to shoot the third one, which I'm really hoping we do, the third one's great. There's a big uprising and rebellion, and my character Gale's a big part of that. If we get to shoot that, I'll be very, very pleased.
I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.
Any time you learn something new about your character, that's really exciting.
When I watch a movie, someone's beauty isn't what engages me: it's what's going on internally. And I imagine it's what the audience thinks, too.
