Source: NPR | Fresh Air
Date: May 16th 2001.

To listen to the streaming audio, go to: http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml?display=day&todayDate=05/16/2001

Transcript:

TERRY GROSS: This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Tonight is the Season finale of The West Wing, the NBC series dramatising life behind the scenes of the White House. My guest is one of the show's stars, Brad Whitford. He plays Josh Lyman, the Deputy White House Chief of Staff. Fans of the show are waiting to see if President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, is going to run for re-election, now that he's about to go public that he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis several years ago. The President's staff is waiting for his answer too. On last week's episode, the White House Press Secretary, CJ, arranged for the President to reveal that he has MS on a primetime network interview. Here's a scene from tonight's episode, in which the White House staffers are preparing for that interview. They're trying to come up with things the President can say in response to the question 'Will you be seeking re-election?' You'll hear two voices in this scene; first Allison Janney, who plays the press sec, then my guest, Brad Whitford.

[Scene from Two Cathedrals (S2, ep22): CJ, Josh, Toby and Sam in Toby's office, labelling the answers A and B.]

TERRY: Brad Whitford, welcome to Fresh Air.

BRAD: Thank you. It is such a joy to be here.

TERRY: Well, well, President Bartlet is about to publicly disclose that he has MS and we and his staff are waiting to find out if he is running for re-election or not. Any clues what we're in store for tonight?

BRAD: I can tell you that nobody knows in the cast. I don't think Aaron has made a final decision yet, and there are actually more ways that this could go than one would think. So there's a big question for Bartlet as to whether an election is viable now, and there's a question, I think, for Martin Sheen about whether he wants to do a TV show.

TERRY: Ah ha.

BRAD: Oooooo. [laughs]

TERRY: [laughs] What is a problem... if President Bartlet decides not to run again and Martin Sheen decides he doesn't want to do a TV show, you and the rest of the White House staff are kind of out of a job, aren't you?

BRAD: Well, there are a lot of scenarios that could remedy that. We have the very tricky Vice President, of course, Hoynes, who we don't quite get along with. Things could happen to Hoynes. I've always kidded Tim Matheson that he's a heartbeat away from a regular [both laugh]. So there are all sorts of things that could happen. It's very funny 'cause we started doing this show a year into our term and when a show does as well as this has, which has really shocked us all - I think we all thought it would be, maybe, a snooty little critics' darling - when a show does this well commercially, they start to look way down the road and they're looking for ways... y'know, we may have to change the Constitution to get to syndication. [Terry laughs]

TERRY: Now, viewers of the The West Wing get very impatient; they wanna know what's happening. What's it like for you, a star of the show, to not know what happens next on the programme?

BRAD: Well, it's exciting, it's the way that Aaron Sorkin, who writes every episode, amazingly, works. He works without an outline, which, actually, I was talking to somebody last night about. There's a lot of great material that he discovers. Very immediately, my whole relationship with Donna...

TERRY: She's your assistant on...

BRAD: ...yes...

TERRY: ...on the programme.

BRAD: ...played by Janel Moloney. Donna was a small part in the pilot and Aaron saw in the pilot and in the episode that we came back with, he saw in dailies something really fun and just sort of capitalised on it. A lot of shows are very rigidly outlined for the whole year and then you don't get to make those kinds of discoveries. It certainly makes it exciting and I can honestly say when I'm interviewed about things like this, I had no idea.

TERRY: Last season ended with a would-be assassin shooting one of the members of the White House staff. It was a cliffhanger ending and we didn't know who was shot until the first episode of the new season. That person turned out to be you. When did you find out that you were the one to be shot?

BRAD: Well, I was... We were shooting the final episode of the first year and we were at the Newseum in Virginia, outside of Washington D.C., and the way we shot it, you would just hear the shots, people were screaming "gun!" and there was chaos chaos chaos and nobody knew who was going to be shot. And Aaron just kinda casually walks up by me and says, "It's gonna be you." [laugh]

TERRY: Tag, you're it. [laugh]

BRAD: Tag, you're it. And then it was very funny because I kept the secret even from my mother, who actually lives in Philadelphia, and it was very funny because when the second season premiered, I was at work and it was about six o'clock and the show was on at nine in Philadelphia and I said, "I just wanna listen to the teaser with you so stay on the phone," and she said, "Oh my goodness, they shot Martin," because they revealed that the President got shot. And then when it was revealed that I was shot, she said, "Oh dear, I have to hang up now," and she hung up on me. [both laugh]

TERRY: Why did you have to wait until the night of the broadcast to tell her? Why couldn't you tell her before?

BRAD: I just thought that she would enjoy the experience of the show a little more.

TERRY: You weren't afraid that she'd take it to the New York Times and spill the...

BRAD: Well, she's got a mouth on her, yeah. She... [both laugh] She basically walks around Philadelphia with a sandwich board on her back saying, "My son is on The West Wing"... [Terry laughs] ...so she's not somebody I wanted to tell. [laughs]

TERRY: Now, when Aaron Sorkin told you that it was you, it was your character, who was shot, did you think, 'well, that's a good thing' - y'know, now you'll have more subplots and your character will be the centre of attention for a while - or did you think, 'wait a minute, what if the character dies'?

BRAD: Well, I was fairly confident that the character was not gonna die. I was also... it was fairly clear that this was not a good time to renegotiate [both laugh]... but I was actually quite honoured by it because I... it was an important event in the show and it meant a lot to me that... I think part of the reason Aaron did it was because he felt like people would not want you to be shot. It felt like a compliment. Getting shot. [laughs]

TERRY: Well, your character healed pretty quickly physically, but you became a little edgy, a little paranoid, and started behaving sort of inappropriately. And in the Christmas episode, the Chief of Staff actually sends in an expert in dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome to help you out.

BRAD: Yeah.

TERRY: So let's hear a scene that is an example of why the White House staff were so worried about you. Here you are in the Oval Office with the President and the Chief of Staff, behaving quite inappropriately.

[Scene from Noel (S2, ep10): Josh blows up on the President in the Oval]

TERRY: That scene is really out of character for you, which is why they send in the Traumatic Stress expert, but as an actor it must have been interesting 'cause it gave you a chance to show a different side of your character and of yourself.

BRAD: Yeah, I...y'know, the challenge in that episode was to get a Josh that could conceivably get through the day, who wasn't clearly nuts, but there was something very dangerous going on with him. It was difficult dealing with... the most interesting thing was to deal with his attempts at humour, which are a defence mechanism for Josh, and something that he's very very good at. And in this particular episode it was very tricky trying to, sort of, find a way to do his humour in a way that simply did not work. It was very difficult to scream at Martin that way because he just looked heartbroken and I adore Martin. It was a very difficult thing to that-inappropriately explode.

TERRY: Brad Whitford is my guest and he plays Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman on The West Wing, and the final episode of the season airs tonight. The West Wing started in the Clinton era and was perceived as an idealised version of the Clinton White House. Now that Clinton is out and George W Bush is in, do you think that there've been changes in the script or are you expecting changes in the series to, kind of, reflect that there's a Republican White House now?

BRAD: No, no. First of all, we were clearly not Clinton. Bartlet is clearly not Clinton. He is a progressive Democrat. I actually think that the current scenario is, for the show - this is different from what I think would be the best for the country [laughs] - but for the show, I think that the current scenario is actually the best because it would've been awkward if we were portraying a progressive, heroic, Democratic President in an era where, y'know, Ronald Reagan won in a landslide. We would have been anachronistic, I think. But now we're able to be kind of a contrast. I also believe that... I think there's something inherently heroic about a progressive Democratic President and I don't think our show would work if at the end of the hour the music swelled and we were all, y'know, jumping up and down in the Oval Office saying, "Hey, we're drilling on protected lands!" [both laugh] "We got the huge tax cut for the top bracket!" I just don't think it would work.

TERRY: How closely do you watch the White House and how closely do you watch your counterpart in the White House?

BRAD: I watch it very carefully, actually. I mean, I follow in the papers, I've spoken to Josh Bolton, who is President Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff, and I've spoken to... a lot to Steve Richetti, who was President Clinton's Chief of Staff. In each White House, the roles of Deputy Chief of Staff or Chief of Staff have many different responsibilities. On our show, we should probably... we should have a show that has forty characters in it. There are so many roles in the White House that we, dramatically, cannot cram into a one-hour show. So, my Deputy Chief of Staff, y'know, is actually down on the Hill cajoling Representatives and Senators, and meeting pollsters at the airport. I'm doing a lot of the things that would be a little more farmed out in the actual White House.

TERRY: I know that there have been episodes of The West Wing that have been loosely based on things that have actually happened. I wonder if the opposite has happened; if you've done episodes and then watched the real version of it later play out at the White House and if so, if you were watching carefully to see how the Deputy Chief of Staff at the White House was dealing with it?

BRAD: How he was reacting to it?

TERRY: Yeah.

BRAD: Y'know, there's actually a rumour, and I don't know if it's true. We did a thing about the Antiquities Act, where the President was trying to preserve a piece of land and there were some difficult negotiations with the Senate. At the last minute, I pulled up the Antiquities Act and we used it to preserve this land. There is a rumour that some people in the Interior Department sort of picked up on that [laughs] and that the sum of the Clinton Antiquities actions were the result of that, but I don't know if that's true.

TERRY: Has anyone from the White House ever called you up and said, "You got it right" or, "You got it wrong"?

BRAD: Yeah, I'll tell ya, last night I was sitting with Aaron, actually, here in New York and a guy from the State Department came up and said we had gotten a situation, the hostage situation in Columbia, absolutely right. He had dealt with one and was amazed at how accurately we had portrayed the situation in the Situation Room, and the situation in Columbia. And that's always shocking... [laughs] ...shocking to us. I mean, what is surprising is the people in Washington have taken it, from both sides of the aisle, have taken it much more seriously than we expected, I think partially because we are not portraying them cynically. Usually, politicians are either saints of buffoons, but we're portraying smart people making very difficult decisions. But the other thing is, that we didn't anticipate, was the power of... We did a show about the census, where there was an argument going on between computer sampling and head counts, and this is a fairly esoteric policy argument that most people don't think about. And we were able to get the bullet points of both sides of this argument across to 18 million people in the course of doing a show that... Our intent was not to feed America vegetables and give them a civics lesson, but to entertain them. But in the course of that, we happened to get this across and people in the White House have said that's an incredibly powerful thing.

TERRY: What are some of the roles that you've had that we would be most likely to remember you for before The West Wing?

BRAD: Well, a lot of people remember me as Al Pacino's nephew in Scent of a Woman - we have a big argument at Thanksgiving dinner; he throws me against the wall and chokes me. I'm the guy who shot Kevin Costner in the Clint Eastwood movie A Perfect World, which was a role I loved - was a guy who... the only time he took a cigarette out of his mouth was to kill somebody, and [laughing] that was a really fun role to play. And, I was Tom Hanks' assistant in Philadelphia, and then there's a whole oeuvre of yuppie scum that I played. I was in Revenge of the Nerds: Part II. I was in one movie I've never seen which was Billy Madison, which are movies that... I honestly didn't wanna play those parts but it's very difficult because you wanna make a living, you wanna practise film-acting, and if you're a high hair-lined, white guy, the villains are now, y'know, yuppies, and that's what I got for a long time.

TERRY: I hadn't thought of it quite that way...

BRAD: Well, it used to be that villains were, y'know, Nazis, and now they're corporate guys who are morally bankrupt.

TERRY: And how does this stereotyped image of you as yuppie scum square with your self-image?

BRAD: I'm scummy but I'm not a yuppie. [Terry laughs] I, um, with my self-image? Y'know, I pray to God I'm nothing like that. And my wife... I mean, when I met my wife, all she knew me from was... she had seen me in a play and we had this sort of wonderful night and we talked a lot about how I was raised Quaker and I had rescued all these animals, and I rode her home on the handlebars of my bicycle. And then she went and rented these three movies that I did, [Terry laughs] and she thought she was going out with Ted Bundy! So I really hope that I am nothing like those guys.

TERRY: You're married to Jane Kaczmarek...

BRAD: Yes.

TERRY: ...and she plays the mother and wife in Malcolm in the Middle...

BRAD: Yes.

TERRY: ...someone who is just obsessively strict in her way of disciplining [Brad laughs] her very wild sons.

BRAD: [laughing] Yes.

TERRY: You each got popular, successful series the same year.

BRAD: Yes.

TERRY: I wonder if you used to worry, y'know, what if one of you becomes popular before the other or if one of you catches on and the other doesn't. Did you worry about jealousy and how uneven a relationship can feel if one person is famous and the other isn't?

BRAD: Well, I'll tell you, we didn't worry about it, but we have been remarkably lucky. It is such a miracle to get a job. It's such a miracle to get a job that isn't humiliating. It is such a miracle to get a job that isn't humiliating, that works. It's a miracle to get a job that isn't humiliating, that works, that critics like and that is commercially successful. I mean, it's just, it really is miraculous. We have so many friends, much better actors than we are, who have not had that luck and for us both... it was just extraordinary. It was just extraordinary that it happened at the same time, and now, for us to be able to go through this circus together, we realise that it would have been difficult. I think it is difficult if someone is getting so much attention and it is a special pleasure to be able to go to the functions that we have to go to, the award shows and things like that, together. And it's not pulling us apart, it's something that... it's this sort of silly ride that we're enjoying together.

TERRY: Now you mentioned that you were brought up Quaker. How Quaker were you? What aspects of being a Quaker were the ones that were really a part of your upbringing?

BRAD: We were not intensely religious Quakers but my parents had become Quakers, and the older I get, the more it has stayed with me. I think the things that I took away from being raised as a Quaker were absolute non-violence, and the simple idea that makes so much sense to me that there should be no intermediary, nobody interpreting your experience of God for you, y'know, minister, or priest, or rabbi. That makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, but, I think I'm one of the... there are a lot of Catholic actors, there are a lot of Jewish actors, all these religions that have a lot of the bells and smells and the incense and the lights and the drama... there are very few Quaker extroverts. [laughs]

TERRY: [laughing] Are you one of them?

BRAD: I guess I am. [laughs] I guess I am.

TERRY: So will you be watching the season finale of The West Wing tonight?

BRAD: Yes, actually I do not watch all the shows because it makes me squeamish but this one I will watch because this one, and I'm not, I'm not saying this to promote it, this at the table read was an incredibly emotional thing. I think it's a fascinating, risky episode and Tommy Schlamme, who is our producer who directed the episode I did where Josh freaked out with the shrink, directed this episode and that always makes it special.

TERRY: And is it a relief to know that you're ending this season without having to get shot? [laughs]

BRAD: Well, ya know, you better watch the episode. It could happen again, yeah. [laughs]

TERRY: Well, Brad Whitford, thank you so much for talking with us.

BRAD: Thank you so much, I really enjoyed it.