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“Creativity involves breaking rules, being subversive, iconoclasm, taking risks (and having the confidence and self-respect so to do). It emerges from acts of rebellion or an environment in which mistakes are allowed, even encouraged. Creativity is really hard work. It takes patience and persistence, sweat if you like, and a lot of it. Ideally, too, there needs to be a right to fail. But it also needs a whole lot of luck.”

Stephen Garrett

Stephen Garrett

Executive Chairman

In 1992 Stephen founded Kudos, an independent television and film production company, and remained as executive chairman until 2014. The Night Manager was Character 7’s first production with Stephen as Executive Producer.

Kudos, under Stephen’s lead with Spooks, Hustle and Life on Mars become the most successful and highly regarded drama producer in the UK. Other programmes under his chairmanship include Simon Beaufoy's Burn Up, Dick Wolff's Law & Order:UK and Frank Spotnitz's Hunted.

He produced the Beaufoy scripted films Among Giants (1998) and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008), the International Emmy Award winning The Magician’s House (1999) and Channel 4’s drama Psychos (1999). He acted as executive producer for series one of Spooks and producer for 2015’s feature film Spooks: The Greater Good.

Under Kudos’s filmmaking arm (then Shine Pictures) Garrett acted as executive producer on Kiera Knightley’s debut Pure (2002), David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007) and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011), featuring Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt. Outside of production Garrett is Deputy Chair of the British Screen Advisory Council and is on the Board of the London Film School.

In 2008 he was visiting professor of Broadcast Media at Oxford University, where he gave a series of lectures on creativity in business and the future of storytelling.

Character 7 has several projects in development and production.

Michele Wolkoff

Head of Development

Michele Wolkoff most recently led development for The Mark Gordon Company as Head of Film, where she oversaw a robust slate of over 40 projects. In her role, she shepherded book adaptations and developed ideas from scratch with writers, including The Nutcracker, which is set-up at Disney. Prior to that, Michele ran Bazelevs, the production company for Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov. While at Bazelevs, Michele served as an Executive Producer on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter for 20th Century Fox and produced Apollo 18 for Dimension Films.
 
Before joining Bazelevs in 2010, Wolkoff worked at Universal Pictures for seven years, where she was Director of Development, managing the studio’s relationship with international productions. Wolkoff oversaw deals with Cha-Cha-Cha (Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu’s production company) and Fernando Meirelles’s O2 Filmes. She also supervised the development and production of a number of films for the studio, including The Other Boleyn Girl and Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre. Wolkoff started at Universal in 2003 as the creative assistant to then Universal Chairman Stacey Snider.
 
Wolkoff began her career in the world of advertising as an Account Executive at McCann-Erickson, where she managed the ongoing production of the award-winning MasterCard “priceless” campaign. Wolkoff holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Radio-Television-Film from The University of Texas at Austin where she graduated with high honors.