One of the best pieces of screenwriting advice I got was after I wrote the pilot for DAMNATION. James Mangold had come aboard as an EP. I had two scripts. We were close to getting ready to pitch the show around town. He thought one of the characters wasn't strong enough yet.

It was the character of Amelia Davenport, the preacher's wife. Or, the "preacher's" "wife." He asked me to name my dream actresses for the part. I named them. He then asked: can you point to one scene in these two scripts that would make any of those actresses jump at the role?

I was annoyed. But he was right. I went through all of my Amelia scenes in the first two episodes. I had all these layers in mind for her, and a pretty interesting back story. But I hadn't written a scene for an actress to play that dramatized her (to me) interesting psychology.

The other main women in the show -- Bessie and Connie -- had scenes where they were driving the action, and had interesting reveals. But at this point, Amelia didn't have an interesting dramatic life separate from Preacher Seth.

When conceiving the show, my original intention was to present Seth and Amelia as a ride-or-die couple with radical political beliefs. And I wanted to swerve away from Amelia being the stick-in-the-mud type of wife figure (Skyler, etc) prevalent in cable dramas.

But avoiding a trope isn't the same thing as creating a distinctive character. After Mangold's prodding, I went back into the guts of the show and came up with the reveal that unlocked Amelia for me: she was the secret author behind all of Preacher Seth's political rhetoric.

Once I had this, then there was an implicit dramatic push-pull to many of Amelia's scenes, as she felt compelled to keep her authorship and intelligence hidden so as to make her creative product -- the Preacher Seth show -- more palatable to her heartland audience.

As I would describe Amelia to Sarah Jones, the great actress who eventually played her: Amelia is the showrunner of the Preacher Seth show. When she's sitting in her pew listening to Seth preach, she's really at video village, watching her lead actor.

I actually wish I could've found a way to make a bigger meal of this: more arguments between Amelia & Seth concerning the sermons & pamphlets, then Seth going "off script" and writing his own material, etc. But when the plot machinery gets going & the bodies start piling up...

Anyway, I'm just thinking of this because I have some awesome actors in mind for a couple of key supporting roles in a new project, & last night I was unable to sleep, laying in bed going thru the script scene-by-scene, trying to determine if the scenes would be tempting to them.

Today I'm going back through the script, trying to find a couple more moments & a couple more playable layers. Since Mangold's initial prompting, it's a process I've gone through again & again. I like to think it usually leads to more interesting characters & a stronger script.