In the right situation, acting on television can be extraordinarily satisfying creatively. But that’s incredibly rare. Otherwise, it can be like working in a really remunerative coal mine. That’s the down side.
One of the most surreal moments in this election was after the third debate, when I heard a talking head say, Al Gore won on substance, on the issues. But you have to give the victory to Bush because he seems presidential.
I am an old, old friend of Aaron Sorkin’s, who is the executive producer and writer. He had been talking about doing a political show for a long time and I had been interested in it for a long time.
Being an actor, you always feel like you’re swimming upstream. People are going, “No, they don’t like you. They don’t like the way you look. They don’t like how old you are.”
We make these people climb this filthy rope and then we stand at the bottom and say, “Hey, your hands are dirty!” To show heroic, progressive, democratic politics at work was more than I ever expected.
The world is very scary. The world would be scary without the choices the current administration made, but they just exacerbated it. And it ticks me off. I want my kids to have a good life.
I did not always agree, personally, on the positions that Bartlet, character from the West Wing, took and I argued against them on many occasions. But Aaron Sorkin said, “Martin, that’s you, that’s not Barlet.
We’re telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.
The issue for my character, and the issue of the show is, how dirty do your feet have to get without suffocating yourself in the mud in order to get an inch of what you really want done?
Aaron is a very passionate, maniacal writer so the scripts really come from him, but he is very open to… y’know, we’ll plan ideas and we’ll certainly tussle about stuff when the script comes out.
