Science & Tech Quote by Joe Morton

Morton is doing that actor’s tightrope act: selling something wildly implausible by insisting on a kind of disciplined plausibility. When he says a sci-fi movie “needs characters who are more science fact... than they are human,” he’s not arguing for robots with better dialogue. He’s talking about calibration. The more a film asks you to accept wormholes, future tech, or cosmic stakes, the more the people inside it have to behave like instruments you can trust: specific, procedural, consistent.

The sly subtext is that “human” can become a lazy default in genre work, shorthand for angst, banter, or generic emotional flailing. Morton’s “science fact” isn’t anti-feeling; it’s anti-mush. He’s advocating for characters whose choices have the crispness of research: they observe, test, doubt in rational ways, and let emotion show up as pressure on that system rather than as a substitute for it. Think of the difference between a scientist character who actually thinks and one who exists to gasp and explain.

There’s also an industry tell here. Actors in effects-heavy projects often fight to keep the performance from becoming wallpaper behind spectacle. Morton’s formulation flips that complaint into a creative principle: if the world is fantastical, the character must be anchored in expertise, behavior, and lived specificity. The irony is that “less human” is exactly how you get the audience to feel more. When the rules of the people are solid, the unreal stops wobbling.