Screenplay Character Relationships: Why the Villain Is Thin

Published by StoryNotes, which makes an AI coverage tool. The worked examples below come from our two public sample reports, so you can check every page reference yourself.

Screenplay character relationships are what a character note is about, even when the note names only one person. A reader tells you the villain is thin. You give him a childhood, a dead brother, and a speech about it on page 47. The next reader says he's still thin, and the script is four pages longer. The rewrite added material to a person. The problem was between two people, and nothing passed between them before the speech or after it.

That gap is the whole difficulty with character notes. Readers experience characters in pairs, through what one wants from another and what it costs. They report the experience as a verdict on whoever was onscreen when it failed. "The villain is thin." "I didn't care about the lead." "The supporting cast is interchangeable." Each one names a person and describes a pairing.

This guide is about reading a character note as a note on a pair: how to find the pairing with the blank, what is usually missing from it, and how to fix it without adding pages.

TL;DR: A character note names a person, but the problem usually lives between two people. Most character notes trace to a pairing where one side wants nothing from the other, one side is never right, or nothing either side does costs the other anything. Run a relationship pass before you rewrite, ask readers which pairs they wanted more of and whose side they took, and change a want or a cost before you add a scene.

Character notes describe a pairing that failed to produce anything, reported as a verdict on one of the people in it. A reader cannot see a want, a cost, or an argument directly. The reader sees two characters in a scene, feels whether anything is at stake between them, and reaches for the name of whichever one seemed responsible.

Character notes come in a small number of phrasings. "The villain is thin." "The villain is one-dimensional." "I didn't care about the lead." "She's unlikable." "The love interest is a prop." "The supporting cast all blur together." "I don't buy that she'd do that." "They're all too nice to each other." Some arrive as questions: "What does he actually want?" or "Why are these two even together?"

They carry a lot of weight with readers. The Black List analyzed 92,613 film evaluations and 35,407 television evaluations and found that characters are the second dimension most tied to a script's overall score, behind plot, with a correlation of 0.83 in film and 23.4% of the explained variance (The Black List, March 2026). Film scripts rated 7 or higher on all five dimensions earned an overall 8 or better 33.9% of the time. When characters alone fell to 6 or below, that rate dropped to 3.3% (part two of the same analysis).

They are also among the notes readers agree on least. The Black List's study of its own evaluations puts character with plot and dialogue in the cluster of dimensions two readers agree on least (The Black List, February 2026), and the March analysis reports that two readers land within one point of each other on characters 65.9% of the time, a lower rate than for the overall score (Part 1). Our guide to screenplay notes covers why a repeated note matters more than any single one. With character notes there is a second reason to wait for repetition: two readers can feel the same failed pairing and name different people for it.

A villain reads as thin when the only thing connecting the villain to the protagonist is obstruction. The reader can see that he is in the way. The reader cannot see why he would be there if the hero never showed up, or whether he has a point, or what it would cost him to lose. Three gaps in the pairing produce most thin-villain notes.

The first is a missing want. The antagonist has a plan to stop the hero and no plan for anything else. The note translator in our pillar guide gives the quick test: what does the antagonist want when the hero is offscreen? The fuller version has a second half. The want has to survive the hero's absence, and it also has to collide with the hero's want on specific pages, so that each of them getting what they want means the other losing it. A villain with a private goal that never crosses the hero's path is a thin villain with a hobby.

The second is a villain who is never right. If the antagonist's position is wrong in every scene, the central argument of the script is settled before it starts. The reader has nothing to weigh and stops weighing. The villain can still be dangerous, but danger without an argument is a weather event, and readers describe weather as thin.

The third is a missing cost. Nothing the hero does costs the villain anything, and nothing the villain does costs the hero anything the hero values. The two of them trade blows that land on nobody. A villain who can be hurt is a person. A villain who can only be defeated is an obstacle.

Backstory addresses none of the three. It explains a villain without changing what passes between the villain and the protagonist on the page. That is why the speech on page 47 so often earns the same note a second time.

Each common character note has a typical thing the reader actually experienced and a typical gap in a pairing that caused it. Use the table as a starting point for the search, not a verdict.

Two rows hand off to longer treatments. The "didn't care" row often starts with a want that is a condition rather than an objective, and Why Your Script Keeps Getting Passes covers how to convert one into the other. The passive-protagonist row is a structure note wearing a character note's clothes, and Screenplay Plot Structure Feedback has the initiative count for it.

Two of the tests need a fuller description.

The relationship pass. List every pair of characters who share a scene. For each pair, fill in three cells: what the first wants from the second, what the second wants from the first, and what it costs each of them to get it. Work across the whole script, not scene by scene. This is a different exercise from the scene-level want test in Screenplay Dialogue Feedback, which asks what a character wants on this page. Here the question is what the two people want from each other across the story, and whether the answer ever changes. A pair with a blank cell is where a character note lives, whichever name the reader attached to it. The pairing that most needs filling is usually protagonist and antagonist, and the blank is most often the cost column.

The argument test. Write one paragraph of the story from the antagonist's side, as if he were the lead. What does he want, why is he entitled to it, and what is the protagonist costing him? If the paragraph needs "because he's evil" to hold together, or if it stops after one sentence, that is the thin-villain note arriving without anyone having to give it to you. A paragraph you can write is a position the reader could hold for a scene, and that scene is the one to write.

A usable character note names a pair rather than a person, says what is missing between them, and proposes a change sized as one scene or one beat. Both of our public sample reports have examples, and they are worth reading together because they come from opposite ends of the grade scale.

The character section of the sample report on Charade is graded A-, one of four sections at that grade and below only the structure section's A. It still flags a pairing problem among the three thieves who chase Reggie through Paris. On the surface they could not be more distinct: a Texan, an allergic fussbudget, and a mute brute with a steel claw, introduced in one funeral-chapel sequence on page 23. The report's complaint is that they want exactly the same thing, which it sums up as "money, money, money," so that once Tex is established, Scobie and Gideon are partly redundant. The proposed fix is not a new look or a new voice. It is a different want for one of them, a flicker of conscience or a family motive, so that his death means something other than relief. Surface differentiation did not stop the note. Only a differentiated want would.

The same report has a note on the lead. Reggie announces on page 5 that dishonesty infuriates her, then spends the script trusting the wrong men. The report observes that her gullibility never costs anyone but herself, so the flaw reads as charming rather than consequential, and it suggests one small scene where her trust gets someone else hurt. That is the "didn't care" row in miniature, applied to a lead the report plainly likes. A third note points the other way: the man she ends up with pays nothing for the lies he told her, and the report proposes one beat where a lie genuinely wounds her before the ending.

The sample report on Night of the Living Dead grades its character section B+, and its central note is about the pairing that drives the film. Ben and Harry want the same thing, to survive the night, and have incompatible methods for getting it, which is the right kind of conflict. The problem is that, scene by scene, Harry is wrong about everything, so the fight between them is a verdict rather than a test. The report's third suggested rewrite is to "make Harry right about one thing": a moment where the cellar would have saved someone, or where his refusal to open the door is what keeps the others alive. One scene where the antagonist's position holds, and a one-sided argument becomes an argument. The same section tracks Barbara, who goes inert on page 31 and returns on page 81 to smash a chair, and asks for two or three small "almost back" moments around page 36, so that the return is a payoff rather than a switch. That is the "I don't buy it" row, with the fix placed forty-five pages before the moment the reader doubted.

Three things make these notes usable. Each names a pair: the thieves against each other, Reggie against the people her trust endangers, Ben against Harry. Each names what is missing between the pair, a want, a cost, or a point where the other side is right. And each sizes the fix as one scene or one beat, placed earlier than the page where a reader would have felt it. One note on scale: the Charade script the sample ran on is 188 pages, so its page numbers sit earlier in that story than they would in a draft of 110.

Get character feedback from readers who have read the whole script, and ask them about pairs instead of people. A reader asked "what did you think of the villain?" will answer with a verdict. A reader asked about the relationship will answer with the thing you can actually fix.

Before a reader starts, give them three questions:

1. Which two characters did you most want to see in a room together?
2. Which pairing did you find yourself skipping through?
3. In the central argument, whose side were you on, and was there a page where you switched?

The first two questions find the pairs that are working and the pairs that aren't, without asking the reader to diagnose either. The third is the argument test run on a reader instead of on yourself. If no reader ever switched sides, even for a page, the antagonist is never right, and that is the note. Collect the answers from three or more readers in one table. The pair that two or more of them skipped is where to run the relationship pass first.

Different readers suit different halves of the job. Human readers are the instrument for whose side a story is felt from, because they are the only ones who can take a side. A whole-script read that cites pages suits the cause side: which pairs share scenes, where a want was stated, where a cost was paid, and where a character disappears for forty pages. Good AI coverage is built for that second job, and the better tools cite a page for each claim so you can check it in your own draft. Screenplay Beta Readers vs Peer Swaps vs AI Coverage covers how to combine the sources across a draft.

Change a want or a cost before you add a scene. A thin-villain note does not mean the villain needs more pages. It means the pages he has don't produce anything between him and the protagonist, and a new scene built on the same pairing will produce the same note.

Work through it in order:

1. Confirm the symptom. One reader's character note is a reaction to log. When two or more of three readers mark the same pair, even under different names, treat it as a problem to fix. That's the same three-reader rule that applies to every other kind of note.
2. Run the relationship pass on that pair and find the blank cell: want, rightness, or cost.
3. Fill the cell in an existing scene. Give the villain a line that is right. Let the lead's mistake land on someone. Split the supporting cast by giving one of them a different reason to be there. Change nothing else yet.
4. Get a fresh read. If the note disappears, the fix worked. If it moves to another pair, you fixed one pairing and the next one has the same blank. If it doesn't move, the blank is somewhere else in the same pair. Step six of How to Read a Coverage Report covers the rerun.

Add a scene only when the pair already has a want and a cost and needs a page to collide on. At that point you know what the scene is for, and it will be shorter than the speech.

A character note can't tell you whether the imbalance is the one you intended. Some scripts leave a pairing deliberately one-sided. A villain who is never right can be the point of a certain kind of horror film, where the argument is with the world rather than with a person. A lead whose mistakes cost no one can be a comedy's engine. The tests in this guide flag those choices exactly as they flag accidents, and a fresh read will keep flagging them.

That isn't a reason to ignore the note. It's a reason to decide on purpose. If a villain is wrong about everything because you meant him to be, you should be able to say what the reader gets in exchange for an argument they never have to weigh. If you can't, treat the note as a problem. Step five of the coverage-report guide has a method for deciding which notes you won't act on.

For the cause side of a character note, a page-cited report is the fastest way to see every pairing in the script at once. The Charade and Night of the Living Dead samples show what one looks like on scripts you can read yourself, and StoryNotes pricing is on the homepage. Whichever readers you use, the name in the note is where the search starts. The relationship is where it ends.