Bad Characters Make for Good Storytelling: A Conversation

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In my new novel Sleeping With Friends, a woman wakes from a coma with only her memories of movies to guide her through the mystery of her injury. Writing it, I discovered that films live in the same half-remembered place as our dreams. But films are also made by real people, like Marianne Rendón. A mesmerizing and fearless performer, her screen debut was in the black comedy series Imposters in 2017. The following year she played Susan Atkins alongside Matt Smith in Charlie Says, from American Psycho’s directing and writing team of Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner. Marianne was most recently featured in the series In the Dark, and Scott Z. Burns’ Extrapolations.

As I’ve gotten to work with Marianne, I’ve grown to understand we have the same interest in the unspoken corners of human nature. Sitting down to talk this month, we were also able to shed light on the many places where writing and acting processes overlap. (Our talk via Zoom was moderated by my screenwriting partner, Brian J. Davis.)

Brian J Davis: You’re two of the nicest people in New York City! But you are truly drawn to characters who exist in the gray areas.

Emily Schultz: I have that experience all the time where people meet me and they think I’m a nice person and then they read my writing!

Marianne Rendón: That makes me think immediately of Mary Harron because if you’ve met her, she’s just such a delightful and elegant person, but she does these intense films. But I think a lot of the characters I end up playing become places for me to express my rage. If you think of the Hedda Gabler archetype—brilliant women that were stifled in all these different ways. It makes me also think about women in my ancestry who were gifted artists that never really got to make that their life. So I feel like some of it is inherited.

BJD: I’m really fascinated by that answer, because this dovetails to Emily’s most infamous novel, The Blondes. Both of you—in different ways—want to access what women don’t historically have access to: explosive expression.

ES: Rage is a big issue for me and in my work. The last two thriller novels that I’ve written—Sleeping with Friends and Little Threats—are both about acts of violence that come from places of explosive rage and you wouldn’t expect it from that person. But it’s so interesting that you bring up rage because I think that I struggle a lot with my temper in my day-to-day life.

BJD: I want to defend Emily for a moment and say her anger is nothing compared to say, the average baby-man on a film set, for one example.

ES: Exactly. As Marianne was saying, there are such different standards for women. So people are always surprised that what I write is as dark as it is. But people are also surprised when they find out that I play soccer. Which I do that because I need a physical outlet so that I don’t become a person who’s eaten up by repressed anger, which is a very feminine issue! I think one of the reasons that we are drawn to dark stories is that there are so many things that—as we go through life—we’re not allowed to discuss. In a darker story, you kind of open it all up and there’s room to examine those things.

BJD: There are pleasures going to these places for the both of you?

MR: It’s not always fun. When I have to go through really emotional experiences with a character, I need a lot a lot of rest! I played this character in the Athol Fugard play A Lesson from Aloes, about a woman going through electroshock therapy in the early ’60s in a very remote part of South Africa. And she was just entirely alone and it still breaks my heart. I’m sure that happened to so many women. And I would rehearse and just go home and be in bed for hours. With playing Susan Atkins in Charlie Says…she didn’t have much to say. There was so much that I could create that was not verbal. And so much of it was in her body and there was something so scary about her silence.

BJD: You and the entire cast took all these infamous characters away from caricature. Did you want to talk a little more about your process for Charlie Says?

MR: My process was to really understand what her life was. Her terrible upbringing. Then I also loved that Sadie was kind of like the rebel of the women. She had to challenge authority to get attention. That’s how she knew how to get it. And I think maybe in some ways that’s how Manson and she were alike.

ES: We definitely want to put it out there that Charlie Says is a subtly devastating masterpiece that everyone should go and revisit now.

MR: What I loved was how Guinevere and Mary really turned it away from another repetition of Helter Skelter.

BJD: Both you and Emily seem to want to go into the stories that ask why? It is the most difficult of the W’s.

ES: It’s much more impressive to me that Marianne can play a real figure, whereas when I’m writing I get to play with all of it: the character building, and the why, because what I’m creating is from the ground up.

BJD: Has there ever been a time when a character just instantly opened up to either of you?

MR: I think with Jules on Imposters, part of what made her so fun was she had a very specific rhythm and it was so fast. You learn so much about the person by their rhythm—and that’s how playwrights often work—and it was just keyed into how much a wreck she was. So it was pretty clear to me who Jules was from the start.

ES: For me, the character of Gerry from Little Threats comes out of a book tour story. A distant relative insisted I stay at their home during a stop. I’m like, “Okay, saves on a hotel.” But I arrived in a middle of a family crisis. And I really knew none of these people. His son had been fired from a job and this sense of shame about his son was radiating from him. So this character whose child’s destiny was his own just appeared—an American king. But to go back to you, Marianne, about needing rest after being in character. After I’m sitting in front of my computer, imagining that character and kind of willing them into existence, I get extremely hyper afterwards. I have to find a way to calm down or to stop thinking like that character. And as I move from one book to another, and one character to another, I have to do that—I have to forget that Kennedy from Little Threats exists and move into Agnes in Sleeping With Friends.

MR: What I admire so much about writers is that they have to be so disciplined and crafting this thing because it could go so many different ways. We also have tools as actors to clear out at the end of the day, if you feel affected.

ES: Please share with the writers! We need it.

MR: I had this amazing teacher at Juilliard who’s very much a mother figure to me, Carolyn Serota. She would do these rituals for the end of your run, including a meditative visualization where you “light your character in flames, with love, and watch them burn.”

ES: That’s so perfect! A part of me thinks that we come to this material because in stories, whether it’s film or whether it’s a book, we’re looking for what ethical choices are the characters going make, and what their flawed choices are, because we want to believe that what we do matters, right?

BJD: I’d like to turn this talk about choices towards Little Threats. Emily, you came to a dead stop in writing Little Threats when you got to the part where you’re about to be in the POV of the person who really committed this horrible crime. You were hesitant about being inside that mind. The advice I gave you at the time was to find out what their justifications were. It’s the key to understanding why humans do what they do.

MR: I come across this in my personal life. I’ll be psychoanalyzing people in my life, as I would a character in writing where I’m like, “Yeah, but they’re coming from this angle.” While Bruce, my fiancé, is like, “They fucking suck.” I mean, you can always just say that!

ES: As artists, the dangerous part is we probably all have a high tolerance for eccentric behavior.

MR: My best friend was just telling me I have really high tolerance for people. It’s also part of why we become storytellers too.

ES: That openness allows the darkness in, which can also carry the truth with it.

MR: Even in my childhood I was drawn to the darker fairytale material. The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth.

BJD: You’re listing off Emily’s childhood VHS collection right now.

ES: Maybe we were drawn to stories that have an incredible amount of struggle. Not the easy fairytales.

BJD: So what I’m hearing is both of you want to do a Jim Henson Company movie?

[Both Emily and Marianne] Yes!

MR: I just want to waltz with David Bowie with his codpiece and big hair.

BJD: One thing I’m a big fan of is when characters are changed—or revealed—by other characters. Going back to Imposters, I feel Jules was drawn into moral complication by her relationship with Maddie.

MR: I think that’s even more true with In the Dark. The character I played on that series becomes the whole theme of the show. No one can escape Murphy and everyone becomes pulled into her vortex of destruction, including my character. It was this interesting combination of “I’m the villain” but I’m also the moral authority—the protagonist is this immoral character and the villain is the person who’s actually just trying. It’s similar to Skylar in Breaking Bad.

ES: When you look at actual crime, you see that a lot. And it certainly goes back to Charlie Says as well. A person who may never have done something evil, meets the exact wrong person, and then they walk into it together. That’s very real to life, and also just good storytelling.

MR: I feel like that is where stories are born, right? That’s where you start the play or the screenplay. Where the character thinks their life is this one thing and then these strange happenstance elements occur all at once. And that’s very apropos of Little Threats, right?

ES: I think especially so. Little Threats begins at an ending. Kennedy has already served time— for a murder that she probably didn’t commit. And even in Sleeping with Friends, which is much lighter in tone than Little Threats, the crime has already happened and they have to help Mia piece it together because her memory is gone. I like starting after the fact and then going backwards, which I hope is what makes it enjoyable for the reader too, because we’re unraveling what happened in a way that is closer to real time.

MR: You were talking about choices earlier and sometimes I feel very paralyzed by choices—how many different ways I can play something. Bruce always says, “Just make a choice. Something, and then you’ll see.” And sometimes it’s strong, but wrong, but at least you’re not like playing this middle ground/wishy-washy area. How do you feel about choice, Emily? Are you ever paralyzed trying to go forward?

ES: It gets harder when you’re doing new drafts of something. Right now, I’m working on a sequel to Sleeping with Friends and I’m having to make some big changes and it can get really sluggish to re-make the choices, but for the most part, I think the choice is the exciting part.  I like to write characters that are not like me, and they end up making choices that are different than what I would make.

MR: One question I’d like to talk about is why are we drawn to true crime? Why do women especially love true crime?

ES: I’ve always thought it’s because it’s a cautionary tale. And we’re trying to learn from it so that we can protect ourselves.

MR: I think it’s more perverse than that. I think, for whatever cortisol high we’re running after, it is a fix.

BJD: You see it as a mediated terror in a way? True crime is safe way to imagine something terrible?

MR: It’s not even terror, it’s just stimulation.

ES: For me, there’s also the desire to solve something, even if it’s already been solved. The joy of putting it together in our minds. I have had dreams where I’m solving crimes, which is weird.

BJD: I would also say that Marianne is not wrong that there is that perverse thrill element that has to be acknowledged.

MR: Then with acting, there’s the question of why we would want to play these people? I can’t imagine someone being like, “I want to play Medea.” Why do you want to go there?

BJD: Would you play Medea?

MR: The person I really want to play is Anne Sexton. This goes back to rage, and how she unleashed so much of her rage in her poetry. I imagine if Anne Sexton was born in 1990 and not when she was, she might be alive. I just think that there’s so much more in conversation about these real dark subjects, as we’re talking about now.

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