I'm involved in some action scenes, so they'll train me for that. I'll be working with my acting coach to prepare for my character.
When I prepare for a role, I try to get inside the character's head and understand him.
I have a new show now called 'The Bridge,' where I play a guy who's a real-life guy. My character's based on the life of a guy named Craig Bromell who was a cop for 12 years and then became head of the police association, so basically the president of the union for 85,000 cops.
The characters don't all have to be likable, and they don't all have to be hateable. As long as it's interesting and you connect to them and they resonate with you and you want to find out what happens and it feels authentic, then we have something.
On 'The Dragon Prince', we wanted to push that even more to leverage the strengths of a CG and 3D pipeline. We wanted details on the character designs, in the costumes and sets, that you really can't get in traditional 2D animation.
The animators working with these 3D models, they're artists, right? They're great at what they do. They're artful in how they move characters about.
On 'Avatar', I learned that it's worth taking some risks and doing some weird little things with characters or having an off-joke here and there, even if it's only for 5 percent of the audience.
We have a writing process that's very much you try to create the character in a complicated way and then you let the story lead you to discovering who the character is in a natural way.