In so much SF, either gender roles are the ones we're used to in the here and now, only transported to the future, or else they're supposedly different, but characters still are slotting into various stereotypes.
It's the primordial characters [of the Star Wars]. It's the beautiful princess and the callow youth and the smartass that I played and the wise old warrior that Alec Guinness played. And it was a fairy tale. It was a fairy tale.
There's always the standard six people you can hire that have played all these villains in Hollywood. Instinctively, when they come on screen, you know what's going to happen. You don't know the story, but you know what they do.
Pacino's always played the suffering prince. I just find that interesting.
Every quirky girl doesn't have to be the best-friend character. It's a very limiting and self-fulfilling prophecy. People only write things that will get green-lit, so they write to those stereotypes.
I keep getting offered these women-with-a-disease things.
Pop managers are fixed in the dramatic stock character repertoire too, ever since the first British pop film musical, Wolf Mankowitz's 'Expresso Bongo' of 1959, with Cliff Richard as Bongo Herbert and Laurence Harvey as his manager. The key components were cast as X parts gay, X parts Jewish and triple X opportunistic.
Very rarely am I attracted to characters that are 'woe is me.' I'm not a big fan of women that have to be the victim and need to be saved, at all times. I don't necessarily think that's how it is, in real life, and I don't think that's how it should be in films.
One of my complaints with American TV characters is that they all have a particular schtick, a hook.
The sassy black woman who can land a good joke was sort of my go-to audition. Or playing a struggling mother.
When people think girl adventurers, they tend to think of a spunky, plucky tom-boy with a chip on her shoulder. I'm not saying that this makes for a dull character, but I think other types of adventurous girls exist. It's easy to fall into well-established tropes, believing that the tropes of a genre define the genre itself.
I don't really think that very much is interesting about the superhero as an archetype.
You typically find stereotypical female characters that are people pleasers, where they are wives and girlfriends, typically, who are in the background.
You do look at a lot of movies and many characters seem to be interchangeable.
Most female characters have either been the temptress - like a Betty Boop type - or the victim - like an Olive Oil type.
So many times, you pick up a script, and you think, 'OK, so she's the sexy one,' or, 'She's the ex-girlfriend.'
I always say, if a guy writes the same lead female character type over and over, we are not seeing their writing chops so much as their dating website wishlist.
When we did 'Thirtysomething,' television was either about doctors, lawyers, or cops.
It's so often that I read for the bouncy, sunny girl men fall in love with who will solve all the romantic problems in the narrative. I don't choose to work that way.
In major studio scripts, the girls are very similar. They're all witty and hot. I'm more of an oddball.
Some actors specialize in shooting weapons and punching people. Some have the market on playing buffoons cornered, others specialize in roles that require heavy makeup or outrageous wardrobe. Some trade exclusively in a post-ironic blase attitude.
When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think 'Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.' You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like 'Skivel-dee-doo!'
The archetype of male hero is so boring. And the pretty, boobed woman is so... boring.
So often, I think shows get into these grooves where they know the characters hit, and they just write for it over and over and over again.
Growing up, usually when I saw a black female on television, she was either a broken character or sidekick.
