What's fun about doing a series is you get to take some time to create the character.
The Tony Stark I grew up with wasn't as snappy and as quippy as Downey Jr. made him, but now I only think of his performance.
The life of a character doesn't just exist between action and cut.
'Frasier' works because we stay focused on the idea that - how he continues to grow. It is not that you are really - the mission is not to try to keep him fresh; the idea is if you naturally put a character in a situation that demands growth of him, then he will remain fresh.
I always look for characters that will hopefully develop into a more powerful symbol.
The Wonder Woman that you see in 'Batman v Superman' is a woman who has been around, and she's very experienced. She understands a lot about man. Whereas, in the standalone movie, we are telling the grown-up story, Diana becoming Wonder Woman, and this was a story that was never told before.
There is a considerable amount of content to what made Tommy End Tommy End and what makes Aleister Black Aleister Black, but there are a lot of similarities. I sometimes feel like Tommy End shed his skin and became Aleister Black. I truly feel that in WWE Tommy End could become Aleister Black.
There's no recreating what Michael Jackson and Diana Ross did in 'The Wiz'. We're trying to figure out who these characters are in 2015. How would these times change their motives, change the things they would say and do?
While in 'Komban' I played the mother of Karthi, a relatively quiet character, the mother role in 'Kanchana 2' was a stark contrast.
The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises it is flat. Flat characters ... in their purest form ... are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor to them, we get the beginning of the curve toward the round. The really flat character can be experessed in one sentence such as, "I will never desert Mr Micawber." There is Mrs Micawber - she says she won't desert Mr Micawber; she doesn't, and there she is.
With any project, but especially in television, I always try to look at where the character is starting from and where he's going to end up, and try to find the biggest arc that makes it the most exciting to play.
[Sherlock Holmes] has moved from being someone who was sociopathic, work-obsessed and slightly amoral, into being someone who has a certain degree of a private life, which is very, very private, with The Woman, or Irene Adler.
Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.
Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.
You treat characters like people you meet in life-friends or mentors.
Darla [from Buffy The Vampire Slayer] wasn't Darla in the beginning, by the way. Darla was just Vampire Girl #1. But I just started adding a little bit of glee and joy into everything she did and just relied on the fact that the prosthetic does the work. And then I didn't have to be scary. The prosthetic was scary enough. I just had to smile and show off Darla's really great dental work.
Superheroes don't often get their powers in one fell swoop. It's like superhero puberty.
Zuri is slowly starting to become more of who I am in real life. Starting on 'Jessie,' she had a huge imagination, and had her imaginary friends, but now that she's 13 she has definitely passed that stage in her life and has grown so much.
We're sort of putting a slightly different spin on Steve Rogers. He's a guy that wants to serve his country, but he's not a flag-waver. We're reinterpreting, sort of, what the comic book version of Steve Rogers was.
You had been a paper boy to me all these years - two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real.
Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.
I'm not sure Kinsey has changed in these first twelve books. I think the reader learns more about her, but from Kinsey's perspective, only three years have passed while the rest of us have been getting older at a much faster clip.
For me to have the opportunity to stay with one character for, God willing, a long period of time, is really exciting.
Superman has been around for so long; he's been around for, what, eight decades now? And he goes through these different eras where different aspects of who he is get emphasized.
With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.
