By Joshua Kazemi
The first beat in any screenplay must establish the main character. Audiences need to see what kind of person they are and what kind of world they live in before any other pieces of the story can be properly introduced. Readers need a sense of their identity before they can root for them. In screenplays, this starts with character descriptions. These are the first few lines that introduce a character, including their name in ALL CAPS, usually an age range, and any visual information that the writer deems crucial to establish a first impression.
Often, we get a good sense of a character with both their description and their first line of dialogue and/or their first action. Even still, there are incredible examples out there from writers who have mastered the art of character descriptions and have been able to impart fully formed characters in just a few lines. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE was released in 2006 and was written by Michael Arndt. The script went on to win the BAFTA and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. It features great character descriptions for each of its distinct and vivid characters.
Olive’s father, Richard, serves as a nuanced, complicated antagonist for the majority of the film. He’s all consumed by a mantra that he’s trying to sell, and in that desperation, he doubles down at nearly every chance he gets. It serves as a point of conflict throughout the film. To establish this, Richard’s introduction and description needed to give the audience a clear impression of who this person is at this point in the story. Where is the character’s starting point, and how might that conflict with the main character’s goal? Arndt does an incredible job with Richard’s description, which is sandwiched in the script by his first two lines of dialogue.
The first thing Arndt describes about Richard is what he’s wearing. While clothing is subjective and can often be excluded from character descriptions, in this case, it acts as the first piece of the puzzle. The following line illustrates how Richard moves and that he does so with the “stiff-legged gait of a former athlete.” Both of these lines are great examples of visual writing, but together they also do a lot to contextualize this new character. Richard was an athlete who’s still wearing a golf shirt and sneakers. And he’s a former athlete, more specifically. These images conjure up the idea of someone who had a dream that was never realized and is perhaps still holding on to that disappointment. Then, sure enough, Arndt reinforces that idea in the final line of description.
COMMUNITY
In this example from COMMUNITY, written by Dan Harmon, the pilot of the series opens with the Dean of Greendale Community College giving a speech in the courtyard. In the speech, he describes clichéd examples of community college students.
The actual descriptions of Annie, Troy, Britta, Shirley, and Pierce in the script are visual and informative. Troy is wearing his high school letter jacket, Britta strides confidently, and Shirley briskly crosses the courtyard with her eyes downward. The Dean’s speech gives the audience a lot of exposition, but it’s in a funny way, and it’s not leaving all of the character description to the dialogue. In tandem, these two pieces work well to introduce several characters very quickly and efficiently. And this unconventional approach sets the tone for the series’ meta humor. It’s fitting and thus allowed to bend the rules. The believable setup gets the job done in a humorous way while being in keeping with, and establishing the tone.
KNIVES OUT
Another example that features several main characters is KNIVES OUT, released in 2019 and written by Rian Johnson. The script was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 92nd Academy Awards. Character descriptions primarily serve the character, obviously, but Johnson also uses them strategically here to give weight to bigger characters in a full ensemble and to establish the tone of the overall script.
Main characters like Marta and Linda get solid, standard character descriptions. Johnson establishes how these characters look, their ages, and audiences get a sense of the kind of people they are. It’s serviceable and by all accounts, it’s doing what it needs to do.
However, in the case of smaller characters in the script, like Meg and Fran, they get single lines of description. These are obviously still named characters in the story, each of whom serves a crucial function, but the brevity of their descriptions and the lack of space they take up on the page communicates a lot to the reader. And even with less to work with in these descriptions, Johnson still deftly conveys the kind of people they are.
Ultimately, these two different styles of character descriptions serve as appetizers for the main course in terms of introductions: the introduction of Benoit Blanc. Where the main players get detailed, typical descriptions, and the secondary characters get short, concise descriptions, the main character, the elusive detective, gets a staggered, mysterious introduction in which his description is slowly pieced together over several pages.
First things first, Blanc is seen in the library, but he’s not given a name, an age, any information at all besides the fact that he’s wearing a linen suit, and that he’s listening in on these sensitive interviews. If one were reading too quickly, they might miss the introduction hiding in plain sight because it is so atypical of character descriptions even within Johnson’s own script. In his second appearance, readers still haven’t been given any additional information beyond the fact that the character is “strange” and seems to be influencing the interviews. Finally, the Thrombey family, much like readers, insist on knowing who this mysterious person is. And in this moment, Johnson writes the closest thing readers will get to a typical character description for Blanc.
This approach ultimately puts the audience in the characters’ shoes. No one knows who this person is, and in a murder mystery, they’re dying to know. This builds the necessary intrigue and gives audiences a taste of the kind of puzzle-solving this script will ask them to do while simultaneously establishing the kind of person this elusive detective is.
Distinct, nuanced characters with depth drive good stories. They are an essential component of any script. These characters motivate the story, the humor, the drama, and everything in between. And audiences need to know who they are and where they’re starting in their journey right away. With sharp, strategic, and visual descriptions, characters can come alive and feel fully formed right on the page. It’s the solid foundation every writer needs to master to write great screenplays.
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