- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart and by Christine and Philip Dial.

- I'm Evan Smith.

He's one of the great character actors of our day, the three-time Emmy Award winner whose credits include "The Handmaid's Tale", "Transparent", and of course, and forever, "The West Wing".

He's Bradley Whitford, this is "Overheard".

A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

You really turned the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving in to the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

This is "Overheard".

(audience applauding) Bradley Whitford, welcome.

- It's great to be here.

- [Evan] Thank you so much for making time.

- My pleasure.

My pleasure.

- Are you offended by character actor?

I called you a character actor.

I mean it as a compliment of course, but how do you take that?

- No, I love it.

I want to be a character actor.

I grew up in the theater.

- [Evan] Right.

- And the lead guy, usually you gotta kinda be the same version of yourself.

So I've always been attracted to what is commonly known as a character actor.

- And the thing is being in a supporting role, I mean, that's what they call it at awards time.

- Oh, it's so much better.

- Being in a supporting role, it's a little bit more boutiquey, right?

Like there are more interesting roles that are smaller within a production.

- Yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, and I'm thinking about when West Wing started and we did not think it was gonna take off.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- It was not a show that was a sure thing by any means.

Nobody had done a political show.

It seemed a little too smarty pants for broadcast television.

But there's a moment, actors are not without egos when shows start to take off.

Where you wonder, who's gonna be, is there a George Clooney here?

- Who's the breakout?

- Yeah.

Who's the breakout?

- You're referring of course, to George Clooney's early time on ER when he was nobody and then he became something.

- Right, right.

And it was a tremendous relief to us all on that show that everybody was the star.

- [Evan] Right.

- It was a real kind of team effort.

So there are, certainly as an actor, you want to see if you can, you're interested in seeing if you can sustain a leading role.

- [Evan] Right.

- I remember when I met Aaron Sorkin, he gave me my career twice, I thank him for it all the time.

But the first time was doing.

- Was in the theater?

- Yes.

In the theater in "A Few Good Men".

And I came in in a supporting part and I understudied the lead.

And at a moment, when no offense to me, the role of the lead character, the Tom Cruise character should have gone to a fading television actor, he gave it to the understudy, which was me.

And it meant a lot to me to know, as an actor, if you've never done it, you want to know, can I sustain?

- [Evan] Yeah.

- You know, the interest of an audience, through a story like that.

But I love being a character actor.

- You don't mind that you are associated, it's been 25 years since "The West Wing".

Let's just say out loud that this is a significant anniversary year as we sit here, it's 25 years since that show went on the air.

- Which is unbelievable.

- Which is amazing to think about.

- Yes.

- 'Cause it's also so present.

- Yes.

And in 25 years, I'll be 89.

(audience laughing) - That's in another 25 years.

- Yeah.

- Well, you can come back and you can just be really hard of hearing, and I can yell at you actually, my questions.

But if you think about that show at that time, really, it has had extraordinary staying power.

There were shows that went on the same year or in later years that we have forgotten, they've come and gone.

- Yes.

- Part of this was the cast.

It's an amazing assembly.

- An amazing group.

- Of people, right?

But part of it is that the show itself, as you say, not a lot of political shows on television, has just remained really present in our mind.

In some ways it's a fantasy, perfectly functional government.

(audience laughing) - Okay.

- Right?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- And that's why we think about it so much.

- Well, listen, nobody is more aware of the, like, I refer to it as progressive porn.

(audience laughing) - Right.

- It's very reassuring in these difficult times to watch.

Oh my God, all these really like, well-intentioned, well-informed people are gonna solve it.

- Right.

Nerds, basically.

- Yeah.

I get that.

- Yeah.

- If you look at the show, we didn't get much done.

(audience laughing) We were not very successful within our fictional world, which I think is often forgotten.

I think the show, first of all, I think it's very important to have a show out there that is showing the importance of public service in a non-cynical way.

I think at the core of every, of the series and out of, in every episode, was a very important question in a democracy, which is how dirty do your feet have to get without you disappearing in the mud in order to get an inch of what you really want to get done for the next generation?

- [Evan] Right.

- That I thought was realistic.

We weren't just solving problems, although we did take care of the Middle East in two episodes.

(audience laughing) - Pretty good.

- I am saying that.

But I used to get defensive about it, and we were on when "The Sopranos", which I think is the greatest television show of all time.

- [Evan] True.

- Was on.

And people would say, "Well, your show's a fantasy".

And I'm like, "No, a mafia guy in therapy is a fantasy".

- That's a fantasy.

But remember I said functional, I didn't say productive.

Right.

- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Which I think is different.

I mean, we've now to your point about how, we have to tell people over and over, public service is a good thing.

Doing things for all of us is a good thing.

There is such a thing as the Common Good, that show reminded us every week whether you got anything done or not.

- Yes.

- You reminded us that government is not bad.

- Right.

- Or all bad.

- Right.

And I actually believe it's something I think about a lot.

I know we're on PBS and it's totally nonpartisan, but the fakest thing about "West Wing" was we had rational Republicans.

(audience laughing) - Right, not just any rational Republicans, Alan Alda.

- Alan Alda.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- Alan Alda.

- Super sweet guy.

- Right.

- And the show is about something that I think is really important in my offscreen partisan life, which is that it's very important, and I say this all the time, but politics is the way you create your moral vision.

Too often, especially people who tend to agree with me politically, think it's culture and culture is extremely important.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- But "West Wing" won't help you if you have a preexisting condition.

"Handmaid's Tale", big hit.

- [Evan] Right.

- How's the choice thing going in Texas?

- I was gonna say, I mean, you know, if "West Wing" is a fantasy of functional government, "The Handmaid's Tale" these days, subjugation of women is kinda like a documentary.

- Right.

Oh yeah, it is.

- Right?

- It is, I am tracking the death of democracy in my career.

(audience laughing) - Let's put between those two, "Transparent", right?

- [Bradley] Yes.

- Which is a show about the dignity of people who've made a choice on their gender identity as opposed to their biological sex and yet right now, find themselves in the sights all the time.

- Yeah, it's one of the most despicable things that is going on right now.

Using people who are expressing their personal freedom in a very private way, and turning them into political footballs.

It's what fascists do.

Gender and sexuality freak us out.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- And otherizing people who make different choices than us is a time-honored tradition of tearing down democracy.

And it's disgusting.

- Especially at election time, right, it's a campaign tactic as much.

So you've done a television show that's about democracy, right.

You've done another television show that's about the dignity of trans people.

You've done a television show and are doing, because "The Handmaid's Tale" is still on.

- Yes.

- Right.

Fifth season was 2022.

You had the writer strike delaying the sixth season.

Sixth season is now be on, I think in '25 they're saying?

- Right.

- Right.

That's about the rights of, and the freedoms of women.

You were in "Get Out", the great Jordan Peele movie.

- [Bradley] Yes.

- Which is about many things, but I think of it first and foremost about race in America.

- Right.

- Right.

You are always with your choices, or often with your choices, at the center of the national conversation at that time, which I think is an interesting thing.

Is that conscious on your part?

- No, I'll tell you a story.

- Because you've been in a lot of things that had no political consequence or issue relation, whatsoever.

- Well, I thought "Billy Madison" was very important.

(audience laughing) - Well, that may be the best thing you've been in, actually.

Right?

- Oh, oh, oh God.

No, I'll tell you a funny story.

- Yeah.

- That is Texas related.

When I was shooting "Perfect World" here with Clint Eastwood, I'm sitting on the set in a set chair next to Clint Eastwood, whose heart is beating once every three minutes.

And I'm reading "The New York Times", we used to have these things called newspapers.

- Newspapers.

And you held them in your hand.

- Yeah, you would hold them.

- It's incredible.

And he had just won the Oscar for "Unforgiven".

- [Evan] "Unforgiven" was a great movie, right, yeah.

- And there's a big cover story in the Arts and Leisure section, "Clint Eastwood's Vision of America".

And I go, "Hey, Clint, did you see this?

This is your vision of America."

And he is like, "Vision of America?"

He's like, "Six years ago I was working with an orangutan, now they think I'm Gandhi".

(all laughing) He's like, "I took the best job available."

I have been very, very, very, very, very lucky.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- Because these have been, all of them have been extraordinary creative experiences.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- "West Wing", "Transparent", "Handmaid's", that they have also, and "Get Out", that they have also been part of the national discussion.

It is not something you can plan.

- Yeah, I mean, again, it's only a portion of what is an extraordinary list of things you've been in.

I mean, I'd even mention "The Post", which is a movie that I thought was much better than the attendance in the theaters would suggest to you where you were.

- I'm just finding out about this.

It didn't work?

- Did you not know that it was not a success?

I'm sorry to tell you.

Right.

But again, like, freedom of the press right now.

- Yes.

- Is another thing.

We're all the enemy of the people in the press.

And here was a story about how "The Post" really brought the Pentagon Papers to light in a way that exposed the things we needed to see.

- Something that is very interesting to me.

We're talking about a sort of nexus of politics and media.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- Right?

There's something that's very disturbing to me, and I'll be nonpartisan about this.

You can have an affair in the Oval Office that is totally inappropriate, you'll be forgiven.

Go to war based on false intelligence without a plan, you'll be forgiven.

- [Evan] Forgiven.

Right.

- The death penalty in politics, and this is both funny and disturbing, deeply disturbing to me, and I think it explains a lot of what is going on now, the death penalty in politics is reserved for my greatest, most shallow fear.

It is reserved for being bad on TV.

That is unforgivable.

- [Evan] Right.

- It is.

- [Evan] Go back to the Nixon Kennedy debate.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- I mean, we have a long history of this in this country.

- Howard Dean screams, get out.

Al Gore is like, kind of condescending.

Hillary looks like she's thinking, as opposed to somebody who, you know, not to be partisan, but seems kind of like a rodeo clown who's about to pull his pinky off and light it like a cigarette.

That's really good television.

That's really good TV.

And it's a little scary that we have to be very aware that we are conducting public discourse.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- In the age of entertainment.

It's a little unnerving.

And we have to be aware of how that can be.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- Manipulated.

- Well, the way we judge success now, to your point, "Is the thing that we're watching entertaining" and sometimes the hard conversations we have to have with one another and with the country are not entertaining.

- And it's more fun.

- Right.

- To watch a car wreck.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- Than to watch a car stop at a stop sign.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- And that's in a media culture that is incentivized by clicks.

- Right.

You accept that the media bears some responsibility for us being where we are.

- I think it's your fault.

(audience laughing) - It's my fault personally.

Seriously, right?

Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Okay, good.

That's great, I love that.

- [Bradley] Yeah.

- I won't sleep tonight.

So let me ask you about your, have now said a couple different times that you're a political person, you have points of view that you're happy to express out in the world.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Outside of the boundaries of a role you may be playing at that time.

You know what the facile response to that is?

"Why can't you just do your art?"

Why do we out here.

- Have to listen to me.

- [Evan] Have to listen to you talk about politics?

Can't you just be an actor and then go home?

Do you think that, I mean, I think it's a straw man argument, of course.

You're a citizen and a human like the rest of us, of course, you have point of view.

But you know this tension, it's not just a new tension, it's been an old tension.

- Listen, I share the queasiness.

I have shared that when, as I'm coming up and hearing actors get political, it's interesting to me that the people who are usually telling celebrities to shut up are self-appointed celebrities who wear makeup like Sean Hannity saying, they should shut up.

- It's the old "Shut up and dribble" argument that was made to LeBron James.

- I mean, eventually I got to the point where like there's nothing less democratic than telling someone to shut up.

So they should shut up.

You know?

- [Evan] Right.

(audience laughing) - For me, I think it's been very important, it's very odd, honestly, within your family, and certainly in this culture, you get a bizarre amount of attention.

- Yeah.

- And celebrity is something that I wanted to sort of spend consciously, and I feel like these issues that I've been involved with are really, really urgent.

Especially at this moment where I wanna make sure that young people can hold on to the fundamental, unfulfilled, spectacular promise of this country, which is that their future is an act of their own imagination.

And I want to use the sort of really ridiculous amount of attention that I get in sort of a productive way.

- You have a platform.

May as well use it.

- Yeah.

And people say, "Is it because you were on a show and you're like walk?"

No.

I'm from a Quaker family, politics was very important in the house.

- [Evan] Right.

- The whole idea was you need to be involved and that you don't just get a democracy, you gotta make one every day.

- Yeah.

- I think we've all thought that there was kind of inevitability of democracy and decency, and we have to relearn over and over that we can't take any of these things for granted.

It sounds like a "West Wing" episode.

- But we've been reminded repeatedly over the last few years that the things that we took for granted, and we thought "That will never happen", actually turns out could, right?

- Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And you understand how we all need to be participating in this, at this moment.

It is at an extraordinarily vulnerable point.

- [Evan] You don't wanna cede control to other people.

- Right.

- You wanna have control yourself.

So you mentioned your family.

Let's do the bio part.

So you were born in Wisconsin?

- Yes.

- Raised in Wisconsin and also?

- Pennsylvania.

- Pennsylvania.

- Right, both.

- My family's kind of funny.

My parents had three kids.

Huge break.

My brother, the mistake, I'm kind of the mistake's friend.

(audience laughing) So my parents were born in 1914, 1915.

I was born in 1959.

Speaking of the vulnerability of rights we should not take for granted.

So my mother was six before women could vote.

When I was four years old we moved to Pennsylvania and I moved back and went to high school in Pennsylvania.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- Then I went to college.

- [Evan] Wesleyan University.

- Yes.

- Hamilton College.

We're NESCAC, Northeastern small college guys.

- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- We should high five, probably about that.

- What a great thing for us and none of them.

- Nobody else cares.

(audience laughing) - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- I try only to book people who went to small liberal arts college on the show, so that's how this goes.

That's my secret.

- So I went there and then I always loved, it was always what I did, I was in as many plays as I could possibly be in.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- Since an anti-smoking skit in sixth grade.

It was just what I always did.

But in Wisconsin, you don't know anybody.

I'm sure in Austin, people whose kids were, like in Wisconsin in the '70s, it would be weirdly narcissistic and totally unrealistic to even say, "I want to be an actor".

- Right.

- But I did it all the time.

I did a lot of plays at Wesleyan, and then kind of on a whim I auditioned and then I got into.

- Got into Julliard.

- I got into Julliard.

I told my dad, "Think of it as med school with guaranteed unemployment at the end".

(all laughing) He was very supportive.

- But you did significant theater over your career.

I mean, the reality is you did Shakespeare very credibly and competently and a lot of other great.

- Yeah.

That was the review, "Competent".

- Competent.

He was competent.

You were a serious stage actor.

I mean, the thing is, we know you primarily from TV, somewhat from the movies, but you were really a serious stage actor.

- No, no doing plays, my wife is here and she knows, like I get all these really lucky acting opportunities in these incredible creative situations.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- But I am never happier than when I'm doing a play.

- So that's first, if you had to rank order those stage, TV, film.

Stage first.

- Doing a really interesting part in a great play, there's nothing like it.

And you're spent at the end of the night.

You're a pawn in storytelling as an actor and on stage, you're telling the whole story beginning to end, eight times a week.

On film, you're doing it once, out of sequence, in snippets, and you don't feel like you get your yaya's out.

The problem with being an actor is that you are a pawn.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- And you begin to, if you are as obnoxiously lucky as I am, you begin to get anxious to take more responsibility for the story rather than being dependent on somebody writing it, somebody casting you.

The reason the "West Wing" cast, I just want to interject.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- Was so, I think, extraordinarily good is they were all a bunch of stage actors.

I mean, Allison Janney, everybody in New York knew.

Somebody said, "How do you get someone like Allison Janney"?

You get somebody who is an instinctively talented person, you do not let them become a star, you make them do eight shows a week for a decade, and then you get Allison Janney.

- Do you think that getting an Allison Janney, or getting a Rob Lowe at that time, or getting Martin Sheen at that time, was because of Sorkin?

Could anybody else have gotten those people together?

Josh Molina?

- Don't.

- I mean, if you think about.

(audience laughing) Say again?

- No, no, no.

- Yeah.

- You know, you know.

(audience laughing) - I mean, I think, look, the whole Sorkin thing over time has been parodied, the walking and talking stuff, the Sorkin approach.

But when you go back and look at that show, to kind of come full circle here, 25 years later, it still holds up, creatively the vision for that show, you understand why the show worked, and you understand why people were attracted to it, to the point that they were willing to sign on to a show like that as part of the cast.

- It was a very interesting experience.

I mean, Aaron, I mean, a blessing in my life.

Like this is a guy who trusted me with his voice on stage.

And then I mean, as an actor struggling, you're swimming upstream against a barrage of terrible material and rejection.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- And then suddenly like this writer at the height of his powers is writing for you.

- [Evan] For you.

- And it, I've never surfed, but I think it's what surfing feels like.

It was just like, oh my God.

An interesting thing, a wonderful thing about Aaron's writing is he writes like he's on a first date.

Like it's the kitchen sink.

Like, this is gonna be funny, this is gonna be thoughtful, this is gonna be moving.

There's a tremendous insecurity underneath it.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- Which makes these parts so much fun.

And it was not Aaron's desire to serve civic vegetables that made that show work, it is precisely the opposite.

It's Aaron's desire.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- To entertain an audience meeting CSPAN that made that show kind of take off.

And it was at a time when politics was, Hollywood's really stupid in many ways.

One of them is they think in genres like baseball movie fails and they go, well, "Baseball movies don't work".

Well, no.

- That baseball movie didn't work.

- Yeah.

Bad baseball movies don't work.

And politics was an arena that nobody thought would work.

And I remember talking with Aaron as we were about to do it and saying, "I really think this should work".

Basically, every show you watch is a soap opera that takes place against a background of inherent conflict and you add the theatricality.

- Yep.

- It's also "West Wing" is really like a backstage drama.

It's an interesting thing and I know I'm talking too long.

- [Evan] It's okay.

- And it's a little pretentious, but it's PBS.

- [Evan] Come on.

Right.

(audience laughing) It is so on brand, right?

- Oh, it's so.

People are just knitting and.

- Nodding off and waking up, nodding off and waking up.

- "Oh, he's still on."

(audience laughing) - This is never gonna air by the way.

- I know, I know, I know.

None of it's gonna air.

- Right.

- But it's interesting to me, and it's pretentious, but a direct, a guy at Julliard was saying to look at Shakespeare as the truth, that the documentary is not the truth of what is going on.

Fiction, an old man staring at a fireplace with a blank face is not actually the truth.

The truth is the soliloquy that Shakespeare would write going on in that guy's head.

In this day and age, where even back then, public discourse is basically an exchange of publicity, of predictable talking points, sort of bashing up against each other.

What the show was able to do that was truthful was show actual politicians struggling to come to the place before they would go out and present their position.

- And we don't get to see that.

- Yeah, yeah.

And we don't get to see it.

- It's been amazing to get to sit with you.

- It was a real joy.

Thank you.

- Thanks so much.

Bradley Whitford, give him a big hand.

(audience applauding) Alright, great.

Thank you.

It was really fun.

We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests and an archive of past episodes.

- You have to generate your own material.

I think that, you really, really do.

And I say this to actors because in acting, you're basically taking your self-esteem, putting it on a platter and handing it to a schizophrenic.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart and by Christine and Philip Dial.

(bright flute riff)