Source: Online
NewsHour
Date: September 16th 2000
"The West Wing" actor who plays Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman
looks at the program's tone and its differences from press coverage of the
real White House.
The following are extended excerpts of his interview with the NewsHour.
The NewsHour Media Unit is funded by a grant from the Pew
Charitable Trusts.
TERENCE SMITH: How important for this show is it to be real and credible?
BRADLEY WHITFORD: You need to be real enough to be believable, but
you don't necessarily have to be real enough to be real. And there is a distinction.
We're telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands
of, really, a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith
in the story, and that's the sort of level of reality that you go to.
Checking reality
TERENCE SMITH: So to get that, how much research or work did you
do about the role of a deputy chief of staff?
BRADLEY WHITFORD: Well, it was interesting, because in the end it
came down pretty quickly. The Stephanopoulos book--which I retitled "Everything
Brad Whitford Needs To Know To Do This TV Show"--was very helpful, just
because it gave a sense of the sort of smell and the texture and the level of
intimacy with the president, which I was just unaware of.
I've always been a political junkie, so I've always done a lot of political reading.
I thought it was a great untapped arena, because in shows like this you have
personal stories against a backdrop of inherent conflict. There is so much theatricality
and so much conflict here.
And the reservation the networks always had was, "Well, everybody hates
politicians"; to which my answer was always, "More than they hate
lawyers?" So you know, I think just in terms of research, though, I mean,
we're constantly--We are fed by, you know, each trip here [to Washington, D.C.]
and any contact that we have.
TERENCE SMITH: Well, did you go and meet and talk to your counterpart?
BRADLEY WHITFORD: Yeah. And you know, the White House's view of us
was always, I think, kind of comical. They were happy to be heroicized and happy
to be played by people wearing makeup with music behind them. But I think they
didn't have a lot of time for us to sit around their office.
Drama and news
TERENCE SMITH: Can a show like this, with dramatic license, convey
the truth about a White House, even better than conventional news reporting?
BRADLEY WHITFORD: Well, I'll tell you what they can do -- and I don't
know how to express this without mixing about five metaphors. But what's very
interesting playing a role like this, and I think what the show does well, is
it shows the context of the difficulties of these decisions. And the issue for
my character every week, and the issue of the show, to an extent, every week--and
here's where the metaphors get mixed--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?
I think the difficulty of making those decisions is something that we can
show in a way that the press doesn't. I think the press feels as though it loses
its credibility if it isn't critical in a way that sometimes verges on a kind
of bitchiness.
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