Why not take a science fiction comic and put the characters in a small town to gain their particular perspective? A lot of that comes from me growing up in a small town on a farm, so that's what I know and what I'm comfortable with. My drawing style is also very sparse and minimalist, so a rural setting complements that.
I love creating characters and becoming someone else entirely.
I like ambiguity because you may be the villain in someone else's story and the hero in your own, and I think very often, African-American characters are either one thing or the other. You shouldn't have to be perfectly good or perfectly bad. You don't even have to be magical.
I've found I sometimes have the best success working on characters I didn't really connect to right away.
I'm not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I'm interested in who's telling it and how they're telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.
When writing about historical characters I try to be as accurate as possible, and in particular not to misrepresent the view they held. With a real historical figure you have to be fair, and this is not an obligation you have in dealing with your own creations, so it is quite different.
In the 'Dreamblood' books, I'm focusing more on what I like about epic fantasy: the layering and depth of tension; the chance to really delve into the minutia of an alternate society and its politics; a large cast of characters to love and hate.
The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged.
I prefer playing characters that are going through turmoil. Most movie characters are just in service to the story.
Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end, it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness.
I get pigeonholed into type-A personality characters, but I'm really not type A. I'm kind of a spaz.
I feel like my responsibility as an actor is to make characters as compelling and believable as possible.
I've been around - having gone to Princeton, and I went to Oxford after that - some pretty fancy characters in my life. And they're just as nutty as the rest of us - sometimes worse.
The dark book has been terribly popular. Dark characters, dysfunction, and all sorts of things from reality that are true in our world.
Aquaman is one of the greatest characters at DC Comics and one of my favorites.
Authors have odd relationships with their creations They owe their fame and fortune to their characters but feel enslaved by them.
I like to do on screen what I'm not in life. In life, I'm much more weak and insecure, and so then you know I like to play characters that are stronger than me.
I grew up in a conservative small town, and the gay characters I saw on TV and in movies when I was growing up were all flamboyant and obnoxious and sometimes kind of annoying.
I must point out - Sarah Jessica Parker is not a diva - she's one of these pop culture characters that everybody likes.
All of my characters are less than perfect.
The initial spark, your affection for the characters, all those things can disappear. It's a perilous thing.
Ironically, heavier comedians, actors, and the characters they play are actually more sympathetic, and easier for audiences to identify with, than the svelte.
The 1960s was a heroic age in the history of the art of communication - the audacious movers and shakers of those times bear no resemblance to the cast of characters in 'Mad Men.'
I really like all of the characters in 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt, especially Camilla, the one girl. I find her fascinating.
Look, I happen to still like really dark, dramatic, fractured characters.
When I started 'Case Histories,' the characters were all going to Antarctica on a cruise. The first part was called 'Embarkation.' It was supposed to be about everyone preparing to embark on the cruise, but it mushroomed into an entire book.
If you go to a movie and it's a great experience, the experience at the end of it is always like this sadness that it's over, that your time with these characters is finished. There's almost like an achy feeling that I have when I go to a movie that I love and it ends.
I think younger readers connect so readily to animal characters because they share a certain vulnerability, particularly when it comes to adult humans, who can be a rather unpredictable lot.
I don't really think about what's 'age appropriate' for my audience because I think they can handle quite a bit, but I do try to think about what's honest and true to my characters who have grown up in situations where they've been taught to handle these things very carefully and that they're very powerful.
It's been a lot of fun from script to script to get inside the mythology of 'Grimm.' We've been given a lot of freedom to explore the mythology as well as the backstories and interpersonal connections of the characters.
'The Sopranos' gets praised as novelistic, but it follows the most banal of life patterns, showing the sheer tedium of being a mobster. It has dead spots, boring plotlines, weak episodes. Characters develop slowly, or don't. Like viewers, a gangster might get bored, fade out of the action, then come back to find none of his debts forgotten.
Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.
As a young actor, I would be invited to the CBC radio drama department to do voices for different characters, and I found that I could do quite a few of them. I wasn't a visual presence, and I found it easier to construct a voice from the written page.
The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.
Big picture, it's amazing to create characters and see them brought to life in the art. And to love that art. But I especially enjoy writing a character with heightened powers that aren't especially useful to him.
I believe what makes great television is wanting to watch particular characters.
