Richard Schiff discusses beauty, brilliance of The West Wing reunion

Richard Schiff discusses the process—and impact—of the West Wing reunion.

A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote wasn’t just the West Wing reunion TV fans had wanted for years; it was the special we needed in an incredibly divisive and challenging time in our country.

As viewers continue to be moved by the performance (and as HBO Max announced this week it’s offering the special for free for the remainder of 2020), Richard Schiff gave Hidden Remote his insight on what made it right to bring The West Wing cast back together, how he stepped back into the role of Toby Ziegler, and the powerful messages in the material that still need to be heard today.

“The right time was because of the 2020 election,” he explained. “A bunch of us West Wing alumni get together every election cycle and do some good work if we can. We do come together to do PSA’s and so on. This time, a couple of us wanted to get together to have hopefully a positive effect on the election, and then Aaron Sorkin also had that idea.

“We decided to do a campaign for When We All Vote, which is the Michelle Obama charity that is helping people figure out ways to get around the obstacles that are put up against their ability to vote. So that’s what we did.”

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With that in mind it made perfect sense why the episode chosen for A West Wing Special was the season 3 installment “Hartsfield’s Landing,” which is centered on voting. The title refers to a small town that votes early in the New Hampshire Presidential primary, with everyone in the White House hanging on the results.

It’s the subplot that is even more poignant now than it was in 2003: Toby engages President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) in a chess game, in which he ultimately argues with Bartlet about the other man downplaying his intelligence for fear of how the public perceives him—pushing him to be who he is and the candidate he can be.

In revisiting the episode, Richard didn’t want to mimic the same things he had done in those scenes back then. “Not only that, but I had never seen the show, so I wasn’t even sure which show we were talking about,” he said. “Aaron said ‘Hartsfield’s Landing,’ and I said yeah, I recognize that title, but what is the show about, again? And he goes, it’s you and Bartlet playing chess, among other things. And then I went oh yeah, I remember that episode. I said send me the script, because I don’t have it lying around, it’s been 20 years.”

“So I started reading the script,” he continued. “I was very curious how I would react this many years later as an actor and as a character, but also because times have changed so much; the nature of our democracy is under existential threat. And what this episode is about, really, is voting and it’s also about a president stepping into his brilliance.”

The scenes between Toby and Bartlet are some of the most interesting in A West Wing Reunion to Benefit When We All Vote, not only because of the subject matter but because they’re scenes that refer back to events that happened earlier in the season. So for this one-off, for people who might not remember season 3 or may never have seen it at all, how did Richard approach playing those moments to still communicate that backstory?

“I remembered the ongoing relationship, the conflicts that Toby had with Bartlet. I didn’t remember this one particularly,” he explained. “I remembered ’17 People’, for instance; I remembered the MS controversy…but I didn’t remember this particular storyline about his father, so I had to go back. I didn’t watch ‘Hartsfield’s Landing’ because I didn’t want to be affected by what I did in that episode back then. But I did watch the two episodes prior to that [“The Two Bartlets” and “Night Five”].

“He was psychoanalyzing as the president, basically, about his father. That his father was mean and abusive and jealous and scared of his brilliance, and that that had something to do with his inability to rise up and step up into his own potential.

“So there was a history of a couple of episodes, but I think people didn’t need that because it played. Aaron is such a good writer, that he made it clear for people who might not have been paying attention. I think I say ‘What’s the topic for tonight?’ And he says, ‘The election,’ or something like that. And I say ‘We didn’t do so well the last time we were here.’ So that tells the story of we’ve had a problem, and then it comes out in the course of the three scenes what the problem is, and what our positions are, and how we can attack it and resolve it.”

Those moments were incredibly beautiful and inspirational when “Hartsfield’s Landing” originally aired, but now, they mean something more—and end up underscoring the need for a West Wing reunion in the first place.

Toby’s monologue to Bartlet also speaks about what a President should be, and how people who are great at something, whatever that may be, shouldn’t hide it because they’re afraid. His words mean a lot when looking at the state of the Presidency right now but they also mean something to everyone watching: that we can and should aspire to be our best selves, no matter what.

At the same time, from a purely entertainment standpoint, they’re a lot of fun to watch. What makes A West Wing Reunion to Benefit When We All Vote so great isn’t just the nostalgia factor of seeing the cast together again. It’s that they’re coming to the same script in a new way. They have new experiences, on and off screen, that they bring to the performances. That includes how Toby interacts with Bartlet—he feels even more determined not to settle—and Richard explained that he had a different way of looking at Toby now than he did before.

“I think so,” he reflected. “I think that partly the writing is so specific with someone like Aaron Sorkin you’re given parameters. Like the scenes require the president to get riled up and angry at me, and that relationship creates a certain kind of power structure. So you might say that 20 years later Toby would have a different relationship to the power between Bartlet and Toby, but you can’t, because the writing doesn’t allow you to. But he does have a different way this time around of compelling the president towards his argument.

“And I think it more has to do, like I said earlier, with the state of our political system and the state of our democracy. That argument feels more compelling now and feels more urgent. We even staged it a little differently, where Martin actually gets up, which calls for me to reach out even stronger. I think when we did it originally, we stayed seated.”

That’s the kind of thing that makes a scene pop on a theatre stage, and that’s the other element that propels A West Wing Reunion to Benefit When We All Vote to success. Every episode of The West Wing (in fact, every episode of most Aaron Sorkin shows) feels like a play and so to put it in the natural home of a play makes the audience look at the material through a completely different lens.

There’s the intimacy that comes with shooting on a stage—in this case the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles—as opposed to a TV soundstage. Actors move differently and speak differently. The reunion doesn’t have a musical underscore to tell you what to feel or when the big moments are; the viewer reacts much more viscerally. It feels more live and in the moment, even though it’s just streaming on HBO Max. In many ways it elevates the material, and that choice also had an impact for the performers, too.

“[Aaron] came from the theater, and most of us came from the theater,” Richard commented. “Martin was a great stage actor. Allison [Janney], of course, is Tony-nominated. John Spencer was a brilliant, brilliant stage actor. I did some theater; I was more of a director, but I certainly got theater, and I did enough plays. And Brad [Whitford] had done a bunch of theater and went to Julliard. So we all understood it.

“The depth of the way it was shot by Tommy Schlamme—you have one scene coming up behind the scene that’s happening right now, and beautiful lighting, [composer] Snuffy Walden and the guitar, [it all] just set the stage literally for a theatrical experience.

“And it flows like a play, as much of his teleplays do. They also have a beginning, a middle, and an end, like a play. Almost every episode has a resolution of some sort, even though he didn’t have to do that—it was a continuing story, he didn’t have to resolve conflicts, but he often did because that’s his training as a playwright.”

Fans have been asking for a West Wing reunion pretty much as soon as the show went off the air in 2006, and the demand has only increased with everything going on in our country. After all the talk and tweets and hype, did it feel surreal to Richard that it was actually happening?

“It’s funny. It’s one of the few times that I’ve actually felt real and not surreal,” Richard told us. “It felt like it was right. It felt like it was another day at work just 15 years later. It was quite lovely and beautiful and easy for all of us to slip back ino those roles. To have Aaron pacing around the stage like the old days, like he had just written the episode four days ago. Tommy Schlamme directing us.

“I had three scenes with Martin Sheen, and he’s one of my favorite people on the planet. I absolutely adore him and loved working with him,” he continued. “And then on your breaks, to go and see everybody hanging out in the trailers, it was just like the old days. It was fantastic.”

While A West Wing Reunion to Benefit When We All Vote was everything fans could have asked for, Richard did reveal that he’d consider playing Toby Ziegler again someday—but it’d be under very different circumstances.

“I had an idea [for] a TV show with Toby coming back as an operative on a local level so that we get back to the grassroots nature of what democracy is about,” he told us. “Even if it’s a Senatorial race or a Congressional race or a state legislator race, somewhere where you get this character back into a small community, and the nature of his power is irrelevant, and he’s got to just get down to brass tacks of operating a campaign.

“I always imagined that he would come to a specific district, probably a House district, to take down an old enemy from the Bartlet days who. Someone like Lindsey Graham, although he’s in the Senate; someone like Mitch McConnell. People who have erased the legacy of Obama, for instance. And if I can imagine somebody having erased the legacy of Bartlet to the point of evil and to the point of hurting people, which is what’s happening today, then I could see Toby getting fired up, going back to basics.

“And if that scenario would have happened, there would be the opportunity, if it was a TV show, of other characters to come back. Eventually maybe this character would go to the White House and then a whole new series would start. And that’s when Toby would walk away into the sunset. I think it’s a great idea, but I don’t think Aaron is interested in writing it.”

While we may not be getting a Toby-centric West Wing spinoff, those who are looking to see more of Richard Schiff after the reunion special can see him in the upcoming season of The Good Doctor that premieres Nov. 2 on ABC—but they should also dig deeper and check out his performances in some excellent movies that have flown under the radar.

“There’s a couple of films that I did that people should look for,” Richard said. “A beautiful film called Clemency, which won the grand prize at Sundance. Alfre Woodard is the star of it, Wendell Pierce is in it, Aldis Hodge was amazing in it. And a phenomenal young director-writer named Chinonye Chukwu directed it. She’s about to do a couple of very important projects. It’s a beautiful, intense, powerful film that people should find.

“And there’s another one called After Class that I did in New York, which is a dysfunctional family trying to put it all together over the dying of a matriarch, while dealing with cancel culture, in a very honest way. And it’s a funny movie. Fran Drescher plays my ex-wife, Justin Long is in it—it’s got some wonderful acting in it. And I was very surprised at how great that film turned out to be.”

The most important thing that Richard wants viewers to do, though, is something that Toby Ziegler would not only be proud of but insist upon, and that’s get out and vote in the 2020 Presidential election. While his West Wing character made a difference in a fictional political world, it’s up to viewers to make a difference for themselves in the real world.

“We’ve got six days to go before the election, and I compel everyone to go out and make sure that your vote takes place and make sure that it’s counted and be very, very vigilant,” he urged.

“When you go to the polls, if there’s an elderly person in your building down the hall who needs help getting to the polls, help her or him out. If you can take in a van a few people to the polls in your neighborhood, do it. If someone’s on the fence and they’re with you on the left or on the right to care about elections, try to convince them to go vote, because this is our last chance.

“I like to say to the young people,” he concluded, “40 years from now you get to say, ‘I helped save democracy in 2020.'”

A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote is available to stream for free here.