Now I’m not famous and I haven’t met Will Smith, but I’ll chuck in my two-cents worth anyway.

As an actor, writer and director, I’ve had a bit of experience offering roles and being offered roles, and my observation would be that good actors demand well-written characters with a solid emotional journey to undertake.

The bigger the stakes, the more exciting the role (for me, anyway) – how would it really look if I was playing someone in a life-or-death situation? As a writer, these are also the roles I love to write – they demand the most intricate knowledge of human behaviour and a really truthful understanding of your characters. Not only ‘what would a person do in this situation?’ but ‘What would THIS person do in this situation?’

When casting my first feature, I was really surprised at the number of actors with a solid professional profile who were willing to work on my little indie flick for no pay and with little chance of the film ever being distributed. So I asked: why are you here.

It turned out that the cast really indentified with the overall themes of the script. Even the actor playing the villain was doing it because he wanted the good guys to win.

When you have that kind of interest from good actors, then you know you’re writing stuff that will grab your audience.

So rather than considering actors to be ego-driven people who like to ‘cry and look depressed’ – try considering them as your best audience. Of all the people that read your script, actors will read it with the most generosity, the greatest desire to find a character in there worth gunning for. Now that’s an audience I’d like to appeal to.

You could also take the position that his character was someone stuck in an incredibly difficult situation forced to make the ultimate sacrifice… and with a choice about who would benefit from it. That its really about how you would choose to make a difference in the world under incredibly complex circumstances.

The complexity of the characters circumstances would be what would attract me. The challenge of trying to imaginatively get my head inside that charactera and that circumstance… how someone would really feel in that situation… its so far away from reality that it would push me mentally and emotionally…

Which seems to me, arguably, more up Will’s alley… and you should check out this clip of him if you haven’t seen it, its a must-watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLN2k0b3g70

Cheers! Can’t wait for more!
Gillian