Christina Hendricks Quotes

I think that there's something really special about doing a series. You get inside the skin of that character 'cause it's such a long time.

[Townies] was a huge cast. It was a bit ungainly, I think with 12 regular characters they had to keep writing for.

The comic book, and I've said it before, is a treasure trove. It's a grab bag. We certainly have characters and story lines that we really want to do - but to get there in a TV series, you have to take your time. Sometimes you can't get right to it. They're two different mediums. So we make it our own and really own the material. I like to think of it as an alternate universe.

TV is longer form, and that's sometimes a positive, and sometimes a more challenging thing. As an actor, you want to be able to have your character develop or transform in some way. When you're acting on a show over the course of multiple seasons, you get to watch a character really grow and change, and go from one place to an entirely other place.

I watched some of Lost series. And I realized that the character they wanted me to play didn't really come in for a long time. It would have just been the wrong thing for me to do.

I don't really think it matters if you go into stage or TV as long as you do a bit of character work, really.

With a novel, you have the reader with you a lot longer, and you owe him a lot more. Obviously you have to have a plot - I say "obviously," although I think a lot of fiction doesn't, and nothing seems to happen. But to me, there should be something that happens, and it should be at least vaguely plausible. And because the readers are going to be with these characters for a long time, you have to get to know them and like them and want to know what happens to them.

I think that television has become really, really interesting, in terms of character development. You can have 13 hours to develop a character, as opposed to 25 minutes in a movie. That excites me.

You never know when you're on a show if you're actually going to love it. For the episodes that I'm not in, I read them, but I try to just forget it, as long as it isn't important to my character. That way when the episodes air I get to watch it like a fan and actually enjoy it.

I think auditions are set up for failure because they're not really the set experience. There's no time to develop the character. You're just looking at someone... if someone's really good in an audition, sometimes they're not good in the film. It's something you learn when you're doing short films. It's the same way that some people do well at taking tests and some people don't. But when you're on a long-term filmmaking process it's a completely different feeling.

I wanted to branch out into American television, specifically because you get to develop a character for a longer period of time and you get to develop a relationship with the audience.

I think that's the fundamental thing - you can go anywhere you like as long as you're following a character that the audience likes and understands.

It's a long arc and a long storyline, and I think it leaves us in a great place to see how we interact again, whether that be for The Defenders, Jessica Jones Season 2, or whatever. We'll see. I don't know.

I think my biggest problem, though, at least in drafts, is not repeating myself. After eight books I get worried that a character or piece of dialog might be too much like something I've already done. So it's a challenge to keep it fresh.

I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.

My characters are usually composites. I wish I could pretend that I make up all of these characters, but no. I steal from people. But people will say to me, "Oh, that's me!" and I'm thinking, no, that's not you!

I always think that you have to have a certain understanding of what an audience would want to see from you as a public person as well as a character.

Mainly, I try not to think about my readers as I write - I just think of my characters and myself - If they're interesting to me, my hope is that they'll be interesting to others as well.

I know a lot of people who say, "I reluctantly watched the first episode because I don't really like zombies and that stuff, but I was pleasantly surprised by the characters and the drama of it all." I think that's what keeps people coming back and brings new watchers to the show. What the show does is cross many, many different viewerships.

I think it actually makes more sense for a new audience than the old show did because we're focusing on one character at a time. It's all conjecture why somebody didn't watch, but one of the theories was that there was just so much information, even in the trailers and promos, of all these different people.

I think every woman character, every female character, has her own arc.

One thing about beginning writers is that they don't really always know their own strengths and weaknesses - you might think you're bad at characterization, but that might really be because of some issue you're having with another element, which is making it hard for you to express character in a convincing way.

So, yes, the five years that we've been working on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has evidenced a real deepening of all the characters, not only mine.

You can't tell an audience to like a character. And I think the best way to get the audience on someone's side is to embarrass them.

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.