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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When I first starting conceiving series like 'Courtney,' 'Polly,' 'How Loathsome,' etc., I was shooting for closed story-arcs but open-ended concepts. Then I started realizing I was committing myself to potentially endless series.
In order to have a TV series, you have to have a good idea for the story.
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.
I'm not really one of those people who goes and writes some big back story and agonizes over characters. I think you kind of can get it. For me personally, it's just kind of more instinctive. But I don't have kind of an acting background. I fell into it accidentally.
Sometimes it's less about the character and more about the story for me. I'll play a rock in the background if I think the story is fantastic and I can be a part of it somehow. That's what I look for.
In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.
I just like a good story. I want the story to be good and I want the character to be different than the last one I played. That's not always possible, but that's what I want.
All you can do is focus on telling the best story you can with compelling characters. If you do it right, it will endure. If you do it wrong, it won't.
I think in some ways, you end up with more interesting storytelling with series, because if you've written yourself into a corner with something in book 1, you have to be cleverer to get out of it.
When you're doing a series, you're really in a zone. You're thinking about those characters and their situations in a free-floating way all the time. They live with you all the time. So it's just as natural as breathing to be having ideas and thinking about what they're thinking about.