The entirely amateur cast was given the next week's script only after they'd completed that day's storyline and they were only given their character's lines.
Duplass and Phillips have a natural chemistry that gives their characters depth and believability.
The show's writers, and creator Shawn Ryan, give their characters flaws, warts, perversions and magnetism, and often not where you would expect.
When they do so in a romantic comedy it's a giveaway that the screenwriter was too lazy and unimaginative to give their characters any hobbies that they don't have themselves.
Thus women authors have quite a hoop to jump through: how can they write about their own gender and give their characters exciting lives and happy endings without being swiftly relegated from literary to flittery?
To film just a few seconds of one scene, the animators laboriously give their characters subtle movements, shifting everything from the lips to the limbs to create detailed facial expressions and realistic body movements.
I sympathize with Benioff and Weiss: TV demands that they give their characters more to do across a season, and do more dramatically, than a strictly faithful adaptation permits.
These kinds of dynamics have shaped the show throughout its run: after the Latina actresses spoke up, the writers gave their characters specific ethnicities — and the Dominicans became distinct from the Puerto Ricans and the Mexicans.
Both Mr. Lentz and Maire O'Brien, whose Miss Jessel was also vivid and well sung, give their characters a sympathetic underpinning, something Britten may have hoped for: however destructive their spectral presences are, Quint and Miss Jessel are also deeply pained by relationships left unresolved at their deaths.
Their volatile subject matter places a special burden on the performers, and Oksana Akinshina, who plays the impoverished Russian girl lured into prostitution in "Lilya," and Evan Rachel Wood, the middle-class American girl led astray by a reckless friend in "Thirteen," give their characters an emotional credibility that makes their exploits all the more poignant and terrifying.
