The interesting part of the process is developing the character, you know, why did he become that? Why is the guy a murderer, or why is this guy a pervert, or whatever he is. So that's the fun part for me to delve into the abyss.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
In most horror films, you don't really get to understand why this character is the way he is.
He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.
He who busies himself with things other than improvement of his own self becomes perplexed in darkness and entangled in ruin. His evil spirits immerse him deep in vices and make his bad actions seem handsome.
I would say that playing this character has caused me to think about a lot of things. He's always questioning himself and trying to get back to something he lost touch with and trying to find forgiveness. Everybody struggles with these things to some extent in their life.
What I really wanted to do was take this character and go beneath the veneer of Lucifer. Underneath it all, there was a guy who was a hurt soul and rejected from his father. How that played upon his choices was kind of interesting, but also it's going inside a shell of someone who doesn't know what an emotion is.
They've turned this character into a human being.
The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.
If you make the bad guy enticing and dangerous, that's where the excitement of playing the role really kicks in. I don't get to do that in my normal day-to-day life. Life is too taxing to go to those dark places.
You know, we have to take these characters - who, granted, have their separate personalities but, on a lot of levels, are pretty two-dimensional - and make them into people with flaws, with insecurities.
Man looks in the abyss, there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.