Early on in my career I got a part in Revenge Of The Nerds II: Nerds In Paradise. If I hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have met Tim Busfield and if I hadn’t met Tim Busfield, I wouldn’t have met Aaron Sorkin. So Nerds II took me straight to the White House!
I grew up in a family where the internalized understanding was that the kids were going to grow up into a better world. I worry, because I don’t think my kids are going to have that.
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.
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?
It’s a very political decision he has to make.” I found from the very beginning that when I infused my own personal feelings about an issue it went against the grain of the character.
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.
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.
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.”
I used to defend the West Wing show from the charge of sentimentality or wish-fulfilment, because I think if you do go into the Barack Obama White House you will find six or seven people around him who are true believers.
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.
The moment I became available, he called me last year and asked me if I wanted to do it and then I just had to audition for the powers that be, and I got it.
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.
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.
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.
