Screenwriting: Alexander Payne on appealing characters vs. sympathetic characters
Published in
3 min readJun 10, 2023
“I hate when movie people say, ‘Your lead character has to be sympathetic,’ which for them means ‘likable.’ I don’t give a shit about ‘liking’ a character. I just want to be interested in him or her.”
Recently, the subject came up about writing characters who don’t fit into the conventional role of a sympathetic figure — Willie (Billy Bob Thornton) in Bad Santa for example.
