In order to appeal to a wider audience on network in order to survive, generally your characters need to be, at a base level, a little bit more likable.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I guess each of my roles on the network have been so different. It's great to be entrusted with such interesting, unique, and completely separate characters.
You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.
I think that playing characters far away from who I am as a person is a lot more fun and a lot more exciting, and you can play with it a lot more because it's not you and it's so far from you, so that's very liberating as far as that goes.
There's such an emphasis on having a character be likable. I don't think it would be helpful if I worried about that. I mean, not everyone's likable.
I try to inhabit each of the characters as fully as I can, however short-lived they are. But most of my show happens offstage.
If I can get the audience to connect with the characters emotionally - and they love who they are, they love the larger-than-life situation that they're in, but most of all get the audience invested in the characters - then I always feel like I can sort of put them in the most outrageous circumstances, and the audience is okay to go with that.
I always want the audience to identify with my character in some way. I mean, sometimes you'll get characters that aren't very identifiable. Sometimes you can't relate to your character at all. I think it's important to keep the audience interested. But the best advice that I've gotten is to live in the moment.
Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.
I always find it easier to portray myself as being unlikeable and idiotic; to actually play a character that is likeable and engages the audience is far more difficult. It's a more subtle kind of challenge.
I think if you're too embroiled in the need to relate too closely to the character, then you start to judge the character for the audience rather than to present it to the audience for their enjoyment and them to mull over the questions that the characters present.
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