You can really help support a character if you understand the setting. So for that reason I generally write about Philadelphia.
Of the many qualities I adore about Melissa McCarthy as a comedian and as a dramatic actor, the best is how fully she gives herself to every character she plays.
To be able to let you know who someone is in just a couple of words, I'd have to pick the most pronounced features of a character's personality. And I always feel like I'm leaving out so many important little ones.
The way glass can be molded or blown or cut into any kind of shape made me think about how we as people - our characters or souls - can be shaped or changed by outside influences.
Before I write the first page of a novel, I spend a long time creating detailed backgrounds for my characters. I imagine the experiences that have formed them, what makes them happy, angry, fearful, and what they yearn for.
What I loved about romances was the character, and I think I still bring that to my novels. What romance taught me was that the 'who' will always matter more than the 'what.' It's fun to come up with plots, but I want to make sure the reader cares about who it's happening to.
I still like the relationship part of any story. You don't want your character to figure everything out and then at the end of the day, go home and eat soup from a can by herself.
You know, it's scary when you sign onto a pilot of a series because, as much as you want the series to go, you also want it to be a character that you'd be interested in playing for a long time.
Well, I don't think characters change. I think they become more revealed. I don't think you really can change a character on a show.
When you play the same character for a long time, you have a shorthand. You get onto the set, you put on your outfit and two-thirds of your work is done because you've built on that work for so many years.
When I was single and on Tinder, that was a good little "Hey, did you ever see this movie?" thing. I would never bring it up myself, but if they mentioned it, then cool, that could work for me. But then on the other hand, if they're like a superfan, that could be weird if that's all they're seeing. They think of you as that character more than who you actually are.
I watched horror movies way too young and one of my favorite horror movies was The Shining. Jack Nicholson's character in that just bore a hole in my brain, his weird, maniacal controlled stuff. Obviously Mara in Village of the Damned wasn't an alcoholic and didn't have emotional, crazy outbursts. She was very non-emotional. But it was that sort of evil that I was tapping into.
I think it's a lot more interesting to watch a character go through a transition in a movie. You love her and then you almost want to not like her because she gets mean and gets 'lost' and everything.
I think fatalism and redemption are themes that help a reader organize and eventually "own" a story or character. Writing them, I just want them to be real, and in reality I don't think events are thematic until in retrospect, if ever.
You're about to meet a new great dame of crime fiction in Death Was the Other Woman. Linda L. Richards does a stunning job in creating a character with a voice and eye right out of a 1930s L.A. hard-boiled classic: guns and gams, booze and bodies, peepers and perps. Move over, Sam Spade: Kitty Pangborn is on the case.
One of the great things about writing a series is that with each book, the novel is meant to stand alone on its own legs, but also to bring along those loyal readers who become attached to the characters over the years.
I love creating stories, dreaming up characters and breathing life into them. From several generations of Irish storytellers, I think that's what I was born to do.
I enjoy playing characters where I get to sort of change my look, my voice. It's not about what she wears, it's about what she's got inside.
I think there are great roles for women in television because there is time to allow those characters to evolve. Even if you're the wife or the girlfriend or whatever it is that we women are, playing those things on TV, they are much more drawn out and there are greater arcs for the role. The roles are more integral to the complexity of the story.
I've been very lucky to have been chosen for and to have chosen roles that are good. Some are better than others and some projects are better than others, whether it's female or male characters. There's still more that we can do and there's still more stories to be told. I would love to see more female-driven projects in general.
There are not that many jobs as an actor where you don't get to know what your character will be doing from episode to episode.
You know, the hard thing about audiences not liking what a character does is that they sometimes take it out on the actor personally. That's something that you know when you become an actor or actress, but it's always hard to deal with when it actually happens.
I like diversity; I want one character to be very different from the next. I love to live with a character for a long time if I can, but I like one character to be different from the next.
Look what they did to MaCauley Culkin. The poor child. I know because I've been there. But I could say after living my life, truth will always win out. And no one can take my character away from me anymore.
I'm not trying to make something that is difficult to perform every night. It needs to proceed at the speed of that character's thought because that's the only way it's actable.
