What does Macbeth want? What does Shakespeare want? What does Othello want? What does James want? What does Arthur Miller want when he wrote? Those things you incorporate and create in the character, and then you step back and you create it. It always must begin with the point of truth within yourself.
My central strength as an actor is the fact that I'm 6 foot 3. A certain power emanates from my size, juxtaposed with the fact that I try to find an element of sensitivity in every character I play. People enjoy seeing that because it goes against what we're led to expect as far as the way men are supposed to be - macho and all that.
Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.
My debut film, 'Madras Cafe,' is a political thriller in which John Abraham plays an army officer. My character's name is Ruby Singh, and I play John's wife, with all the strappings of an army man's wife.
The same way that you are the main character of your story, you are only a secondary character in everybody else's story.
When you are reading about a book, you focus on the main character, of course. When you have something in common with them and connect with them, you remember the lessons they learned, and then you can apply them to your life. So you can live the best life you can.
When writers don't know what to do with a character, they build up the supporting cast and universe to kind of hide that fact. After a while, you can no longer see the character for the underbrush. When that happens, you need to bring out the weed-whacker to clear some of that away so you can focus on the main character.
Coming from TV and film, rule number one is that you always service the main character first and foremost. If that's not working, you've got nothing.
If you've seen 'Spirited Away', 'Spirited Away' is set in a very, very Japanese sensibility. And so, to Japanese audiences, when Sen would walk up, the main character, and look at this big building with a flag on it with Japanese writing on it, everyone in Japan would know what that is.
To me the interesting main character is never the one without flaws.
Stories in which the player doesn't inhabit the main character are difficult for games to handle.
In the biographical novel, there's only one person involved. I, the author, spend two to five years becoming the main character. I do that so by the time you get to the bottom of Page 2 or 3, you forget your name, where you live, your profession and the year it is. You become the main character of the book. You live the book.
I'm often asked where my nickname 'Kun' comes from. My parents says it was a Japanese cartoon I used to watch on television when I was very young, set in the Stone Age, where the main character was a boy called Kum Kum, the little caveman.
While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle underlying issues elsewhere in the story.
I called my show 'Power' because, for me, the whole series is about the way my main character, Ghost, is power-less over his circumstances, even though he has almost endless access to money and guns.
Sometimes female characters start out as the wife or girlfriend, but then I realize, 'No, she's the book,' and she becomes a main character. I surrender the book to her.
There's a real, brutal nature to the capitalism practiced by the main character in 'How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.' And I think playing dirty is certainly part of that.
When you don't have a main character that's flawed, I don't know how you relate to that person.
The main character in the book is usually someone you're identifying with because the story is being told through this person's mind.
I couldn't bloody believe a prime-time TV show would have an Iraqi ex-Republican Guard torturer as a main character.
