I would love to own a nightclub like Harlem’s Paradise, where I could just watch endless musical acts performing, but I am most definitely not on par with Cottonmouth in the bad guy department, so I’ll just have to live vicariously through him.
As writer/producer Aïda Croal put it in the above clip, Cottonmouth was the hero of his own story, not envisioning himself as the villain that others saw him as.
At least in that first batch of episodes.
Which inherently ties into what Mike Colter is talking about, in that the character’s unfiltered selfishness and self-absorption is what many viewers gravitated towards, since he’s showing off aspects of our personalities that aren’t meant to be put in the spotlight like that.