Finding a balance between Protagonist and non-Protagonist characters

This subject came up in my current Character Development Keys class: How in some movies, the most memorable characters are not the Protagonist. My response:

While it’s a great thing to create such entertaining and compelling characters as the Joker, Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader, Rooster Cogburn, and so forth, there’s a point at which they can become too prominent and overshadow the Protagonist.

That’s one reason why it’s so critical to dig into the Protagonist and make sure their psychological journey combined with the events of the plot are big enough to grab the reader’s attention, both intellectual and emotional.

Hannibal Lecter may be the most memorable character in The Silence of the Lambs, compared to Clarice who is in some ways a ‘typical’ heroine in pressing ahead singlemindedly toward her goal of nabbing Buffalo Bill and saving Catherine Martin. Her personality is certainly not as entertaining as Lecter’s.

But there is the mystery: What is she afraid of revealing about herself? How does it tie into the death of her father? Why does she keep having nightmares with screaming lambs? That sustains the reader until the point where Lecter escapes [end of Act Two], then it becomes the classic Protagonist v. Nemesis story, leading to the inevitable Final Struggle.

If Clarice did not have that whole backstory, then the movie probably wouldn’t work. But because she does, her character is in its own way ‘big’ enough to stand in relative equality in terms of screen presence to Lecter.

On an even more pragmatic level, I read scripts all the time where the writer clearly fell in love with / enjoyed writing more a non-Protagonist figure. Again great that they could find that creative zone. However if it makes the Protagonist feel like milquetoast in comparison, I challenge them to go back, dig deeper, and think more about why this is the Protagonist’s story, what about it makes it meaningful and important, etc.

If you are writing a traditional single Protagonist story where they go through some sort of significant metamorphosis, the specifics of their journey have to be big enough to capture and sustain the interest of the reader, and be equivalent in their own way to the presence of other characters.