So my character on 'Tyrant' is a chap called Barry Al Fayeed, and he is the second son of a fictional Middle Eastern dictator. But, he has grown up since he was young in America. He's trained as a doctor. He's married a beautiful American girl, had two kids, so he's very much an American.
I'm always a little apprehensive about 'decoding' fictional stories.
For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.
In 'Shadow Tag,' Erdrich creates scenes from a fictional marriage, that of two American Indians, Irene and her painter husband Gil, that suggest some of the worst psychological torments and stresses of real life.
I was 9 when I wrote 'Fate Stay with Me.' It was this fictional song about romance gone wrong.
My approach is always the same. I try to be as honest as possible. Find the real honesty and humanity in the character because even a fictional character is supposed to feel real. And my job is to find that reality and bring it to the screen.
It might be the history major in me, but I look to the past when I try to construct my fictional futures.
I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.
So far, everything I've worked on has been deeply connected to reality. I'm not constitutionally opposed to working on something completely fictional, either. It just happens that a lot of these stories have crossed my path in a way that makes them intriguing, but I'm up for anything that's intellectually engaging.
In 'Hope Never Dies', the fictional Obama and Biden go up against drug traffickers, outlaw bikers, and other seedy opponents. They're forced to use skills they didn't know they had. Or, to put it another way, unlike Jordan Peele's Obama, this Obama doesn't need an anger translator.
