I think Shakespeare really got it. He was the first one to introduce psychology to villains and give them a real point of view.
Shakespeare's villains are fabulous because none of them know that they are villains. Well, sometimes they do.
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 like devilish, thorny, dirty, mean roles, muck and mire, unbelievably sad, unbelievably happy, burdened. Inner conflict - that's where drama is.
To me, the more interesting villains are the ones you can, in some sense, relate to or sympathize with at times. Maybe you sympathize with them one moment; the next moment, they do something truly atrocious, and you feel bad you ever sympathized with them in the first place.
...my soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.
No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil.
I think I am fascinated with slightly tragic characters.
I suppose the textbook definition of an anti-hero is pretty straightforward - a protagonist who embodies not only heroic characteristics but also some characteristics typically deemed non-heroic, even villainous.
What makes Shakespeare eternal is his grasp of psychology. He knew how to nail stuff about us as human beings.
I've always been interested in the antihero myself.
If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue.
I'm not interested in characters who aren't broken. I'm not interested in happy people. It just doesn't draw me as a writer.
Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.
Everyone loves characters that are relatable or who have unique quirks or tragic flaws.
