I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.
I love stories about two people who are doing illegal things, who we really enjoy watching despite the fact that we know they are doomed in some way.
Some of my acting heroes have built careers on playing characters who do horrendous things - they're repellent and lovable. They're not likable, but they're lovable. I think Christine is one of those characters.
Loser lit antiheroes aren't well intentioned or earnest; they don't care whether you like them or not. They're self-mocking, ironic and inventive; they narrate their downfalls with manic wordplay, rampant metaphors, wisecracks, and escalating flights of spleen-fueled lyricism.
In this day and age, where you have a lot of comic book movies made every day, and most of them are really good boys, it's important to have a couple bad boys out there, too.
I'm just attracted to playing people who are ostensible unlikable. That's not to say that there's something in there that makes you care. It might be that you just find them so awful that you just can't stop watching, like a car crash.
'Sons of Anarchy' is always murky.
There are heroes of wickedness, as there are of goodness.
I was not a gigantic fan of 'The A-Team' as a kid. I was a huge 'Miami Vice' fan. So for me, not necessarily to say that I put a 'Miami Vice'ish spin on 'The A-Team,' but for me, what I was most intrigued by was this notion of these four guys, these four kind of special operators.
I'm more comfortable writing traditional protagonists. But 'Steve Jobs' and 'The Social Network' have antiheroes. I like to write antiheroes as if they're making their case to God about why they should be allowed into heaven. I have to find something in that character that is like me and write to that.
Mischief nodded. 'It's true,' he conceded. 'You're in the company of eight world-class thieves,' he said, not without a little touch of pride. 'Saints we are not.' But then,' said Deaux-Deaux, 'who is?' he thought on this. 'Besides saints.
It's a different thing with cable TV. You don't have to have your characters be lovely again by the end of the episode. And in this era of the male antiheroes on cable TV, you don't even need to make them likable; you just need to make them compelling. As opposed to film, where it's still those basic tropes of good versus evil. But for women, I don't think that has been widely seen yet.
Women are really complex and totally enigmatic. Humans are really complex, but in film, we've only ever seen that with men. We've seen antiheroes time and again with male characters.
My parents used to talk about Sergio Leone films a lot. And I got really into them. I love Clint Eastwood. I love the camera angles. I love the music.
I've always had antiheroes in my film.
I admire Brad Pitt. He hasn't just done leading-man hunky roles; he's done a lot of edgier things. I like playing people with a dark side.
'Sons of Anarchy' has the perfect combination of character and action.
I'd really like to play bad guys or guys that have something a little bit off about them. And I get to do that periodically.
They wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn't be heroes if they weren't miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again.
I think I was always interested in darker characters just because there was a lot more to do.
The villains that I play, I always think that they are grounded, wonderful people with enormous intellects who are very exciting to spend an evening with. I never see them as bad people.
The bad guys have way more fun, in my opinion. 'Bad guys' in quotes.
I loved films of the '70s with those antihero protagonists who you don't know if you can get behind because their behavior is really questionable.
These are the kinds of stories I'm really interested in telling: bad stories about bad people, I'm comfortable with.
I'm very, very attracted to morally ambiguous characters, not just pure bad guys or pure good guys.
