"And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist"
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Anna Friel is sneaking a hard truth about acting past the moral panic that clings to certain roles: audiences don’t actually bond with “good people.” They bond with legible people. Her line draws a bright boundary between ethics and empathy, insisting that a character’s job isn’t to pass a purity test but to be psychologically persuasive enough that viewers can’t look away.
The phrase “apart from telling a good, believable story” is the quiet flex here. She treats narrative credibility as the minimum requirement, then shifts to the real currency of screen performance: care. Not approval, not identification, but care as in attention with stakes. When she adds “being a true character,” she’s arguing against the cardboard villain and the prestige-drama archetype alike. “True” suggests specificity: contradictions, hungers, self-justifications, the private logic that makes terrible choices feel, to the character, inevitable.
Then comes the rhetorical grenade: “even if you’re playing a murderer or rapist.” It’s blunt because it has to be. Friel is naming the roles that attract both fascination and backlash, and she’s defending the actor’s craft from the accusation that portraying harm equals endorsing it. The subtext is pragmatic: if the audience can’t care, the story can’t interrogate anything. It becomes spectacle, not drama.
In a culture that increasingly asks art to behave like a morality lesson, Friel’s point is almost rebellious: the route to accountability onscreen runs through complexity, not sanctimony.
The phrase “apart from telling a good, believable story” is the quiet flex here. She treats narrative credibility as the minimum requirement, then shifts to the real currency of screen performance: care. Not approval, not identification, but care as in attention with stakes. When she adds “being a true character,” she’s arguing against the cardboard villain and the prestige-drama archetype alike. “True” suggests specificity: contradictions, hungers, self-justifications, the private logic that makes terrible choices feel, to the character, inevitable.
Then comes the rhetorical grenade: “even if you’re playing a murderer or rapist.” It’s blunt because it has to be. Friel is naming the roles that attract both fascination and backlash, and she’s defending the actor’s craft from the accusation that portraying harm equals endorsing it. The subtext is pragmatic: if the audience can’t care, the story can’t interrogate anything. It becomes spectacle, not drama.
In a culture that increasingly asks art to behave like a morality lesson, Friel’s point is almost rebellious: the route to accountability onscreen runs through complexity, not sanctimony.
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| Topic | Movie |
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