Crystal Chappell Quotes

It's always nice to do the flashbacks. That's what's so great about 'Scandal' is that we get to do flashbacks and then keep figuring out and discovering more things about our characters that make them fuller.

I don't think the challenge is asking an audience to like a character; it's inviting them to try and understand them... then making that journey entertaining and worth their while. It's a classic trick, but it's human, and it allows characters to have more depth.

From a writer's standpoint, each character and story presents its own unique challenges and delights. I'm deeply curious about all of my characters, and I love peeling away their layers to see what's underneath their skin, or secreted deep within their hearts.

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

The fun thing about doing origin stories is you are introducing the audience to characters.

Quite honestly, I think that if you are making a lot of television programs with a central character, then ultimately it can become boring if you know nothing about them. I personally want to know, or get to know, things about a character. It doesn't mean to say that they still can't have a certain mystery about them.

The most I could hope for is to come and try and develop a character who is interesting, who is interesting to me, who is interesting to fans and who could contribute to the storytelling that is 'Law & Order: SVU.'

Also, in my acting, I feel very much like a storyteller, exploring the flaws of the characters that I interpret. I look for the imperfections, and I love a character that is just so flawed.

'Longmire' is more of a show about the characters, and you couldn't pay a bigger compliment than to want to know more about my character, or the characters on the show.

I do build my own backstory as an actor. It's important to know where your characters have come from in order to know where they're going - in order to exist in that state of being.

I'm sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.

When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.

When I'm breaking in a character like Jessica Jones, I have this amazing opportunity to create her backstory. It's all of the work that happens before I'm ever on camera... Writing 'Bonfire' was like doing all of that fun stuff; it was like 300 pages of prep work.

We have a writing process that's very much you try to create the character in a complicated way and then you let the story lead you to discovering who the character is in a natural way.

Detailing and backstories are so important; only they draw you into the life of a character.

There is nothing like being able to develop a three-dimensional character over a long period of time. Sometimes you aren't able to fully portray a character because you only have a couple of scenes to do it in, and you don't get the full life and background of that character.

You have to be involved and relate to the characters in order to make a film that is true emotionally.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

In a series, you really need to stay open-minded. It's not like a play or a film, where you can create and fully commit to your character's back-story.

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

I think it's important that a director be able to know his characters inside and out.

There's no particular role that comes to mind that I'd like to take on, but for me, it's about playing interesting characters and not just two-dimensional ones.

I remember my dad working with me on breaking down my script and writing out a back story for my character and all that stuff.

For every book that I write... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life.