Zach Anner Quotes

Most people had high school. I had Breaking Bad.

I like the fact that a modern television and modern drama on cable has characters that are really intricate and deep and have multiple layers.

I'm such a fan of Deadwood. I love the characters in that. They're such wonderful characters. I'm a fan of The Wire. Those are all heavily character-based shows.

I loved 'Homeland' - it's such an intriguing, intelligent piece of television, and I am fascinated by them making a hero and heroine that are so odd, so flawed and so complicated. It is a programme that really draws you in.

I love to start characters in a place where you think you know them. We can make all kinds of assumptions about them and think they have no redeeming qualities, but like everyone, they're complex.

Sometimes, the smaller roles in movies can be the most interesting. If you only take the stance that you'll only play central characters in movies, you'll find yourself not being able to indulge in that morally grey terrain that makes support characters so rich and interesting.

A lot of shows peak after a series and never get it back, but 'Breaking Bad' keeps the tension up all the time.

I love the conflict of relationships on 'Justified.'

I've decided 'Breaking Bad' may be one of the best TV shows ever, but I had to watch every last episode of the first four seasons to come to that conclusion.

'Better Call Saul' gets surprisingly dark.

Compared to the other work I've done on TV, 'Breaking Bad' was funny. In the beginning, I described it as a dark comedy.

The great thing about 'Breaking Bad' was they were able to write themselves out of anything.

If you break things down to goodies and baddies, the baddies are always a bit more alluring in fiction, and that's true from a narrative point of view. But I wanted to write a novel about real life, and real life is a bit more nuanced than that.

If you cared enough about your characters, what happened to them was interesting... it's important to care about them, about who they are and what they do...I don't really care whose side they are on, and they can be monstrous on the outside or, worse, on the inside, but you still have to want to spend time with them.

Somehow we allow, if a character goes to the dark side, if we're hooked into that character - I'm obsessed with Peaky Blinders. Those characters are awful, and yet you root for them. You love them! Same with Breaking Bad. That's not as easy in a feature.

The best characters are always wretchedly flawed

If it's strictly comedy, I like to bring some darkness to it. If it's strictly drama, I always like to lighten it up as well. I like to find some kind of dimension and make my characters human, so that it doesn't feel like a sketch and feels more like a slice of life.

I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.

The Leftovers was an absolutely extraordinary experience. After the first season of learning to work with Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta, and all of the writers, you didn't question it because it all made sense. Because Damon knows those characters so well and has thought it through so well, there was never a time that I asked a question where it wasn't answered fully.

You never want to play too vampiric or generically evil, so you look for emotions or character traits that you can relate to.

I love female-driven drama, and those kinds of characters. I really love complex women.

You know that's why people don't like unlikeable characters. It's not that they're not interesting. Everybody knows the most interesting character in a book or a movie or whatever narrative is the villain.

I've always been interesting in characters that challenge people and who are not always that easy to like.

But the quality of writing in the series [game of Thrones] is paramount. That's probably why all of us are involved in this and all of us are quite so loyal to it, because we don't have to expend a lot of energy trying to make a silk purse out of a pig's ear. The quality of the writing is really good, and that's what makes playing a character so enjoyable, whether he's heroic or villainous.

...being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.