THREE

“THESE WOMEN…” AND A FEW GOOD MEN

Part I

LEO McGARRY

Grizzled veteran politico Leo McGarry was the former labor secretary–slash–Democratic Party bigwig and the president’s best friend and chief of staff. In the Bartlet administration and, obviously, in many nonfiction ones too, the chief of staff is the person in whom POTUS enjoys undeniable, unwavering faith. Midway through season 1, President Bartlet outlined the key traits for that position with three simple questions and one definitive—and definitively moving—answer. (MELISSA: The fact that Leo overheard this moment is, in our humble opinion, a deeply underrated West Wing grace note.)

You got a best friend? Is he smarter than you? Would you trust him with your life? That’s your chief of staff.

—PRESIDENT BARTLET TO SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE ROGER TRIBBEY, “HE SHALL FROM TIME TO TIME…”

Several talented people auditioned for the role of Leo, including “obtuse” Shawshank Redemption warden Bob Gunton; veteran character actors Paul Dooley, Michael Lerner, and Alan Rosenberg; and actress CCH Pounder, who would later come within an Allison Janney of landing the role of C.J. Cregg. (More on that later!) One other potential chief of staff, Levey told us, brought a more comedic pedigree to the table. Jay Thomas—an alum from another iconic NBC show, Cheers—had the room in stitches. In the end, despite these excellent challengers stepping into the ring, it wasn’t anything remotely like a fair fight. Because years earlier, this guy named John Spencer—an actor’s actor from TV, film, and stage (on and off Broadway)—had done a series in New York for John Wells Productions. Thanks to Trinity, Wells and Levey were already enchanted by his work. (As were devotees of his smirky, scrap-tastic lawyer Tommy Mullaney on a third iconic NBC show, L.A. Law.) But when the role of Leo first came up, John Wells says, it was complicated by one fact: “We wanted Martin to play Bartlet.”

See, in The American President Martin Sheen had played Andrew Shepherd’s best friend and chief of staff, A.J. McInerney, aka the “Leo” part. “Who can we put into that part,” John Wells wondered, “who’s not going to interfere in Aaron’s head with how Martin had played it in the movie?” As he put it to us, “It had to have a completely different kind of thing to it.”

In early conversations about casting, members of the creative team typically throw out the names of actors who could be a good fit for the characters in the script, or who might, at the very least, serve as templates for them. For Leo McGarry, Aaron kept coming back to the same name, the perfect model for Jed Bartlet’s closest friend and confidant. “I told Tommy and the casting directors, ‘We need someone like John Spencer!’ ” In the first instance of what would become a common refrain during the show’s early years, Tommy Schlamme chimed in with a question that was hiding right in plain sight. “What about John Spencer?”

Having grown up in New York and New Jersey, John Spencer had spent decades in close proximity to some of the country’s finest filmmakers and theater professionals and had come to view acting as a high art. He knew well the power in making the audience truly believe something—in transporting them somewhere new—because he had experienced it himself countless times throughout his life. It helped, too, that, through quirk of fate, genetics, or geography, John had the look of a lifelong public servant—steely-eyed and competent, he naturally exuded a twinkly, smartass, streetwise optimism. And no one did sincere like John Spencer. When he smiled—and he smiled a lot—he had folds in his cheeks, which conveyed hard-won wisdom and true grit.

Leo’s made out of leather. His face has a map of the world on it.

—PRESIDENT BARTLET TO JOSH, “BARTLET FOR AMERICA”

According to Levey, when John came in and read for Leo, everybody in the room was kind of just blown away. “John was camera-ready for that part after the first sentence,” the casting director says. “No one else on the planet had a single chance in hell after he finished. I mean, it was a shootable audition. If it wasn’t for the picture of my son in the background, you could’ve just put it in the show.”

When John ambled out of the room, Tommy told us, it was clear: “He’s got to play this character,” the director said, “or let’s cast him as the manager of the Yankees.” Growing up, Tommy had played a ton of sports. John’s take on Leo brought him right back to “those benevolent, brilliant coaches that I had, who just felt like…ya know, that toast: Never above you, never below you, right with you.” The director saw the Leo that John Spencer had just brought to life as the perfect man to control the chaos of Jed Bartlet’s West Wing.

In a 2002 conversation with CNN’s David Daniel, John Spencer himself reflected on that life-changing day. “I knew the audition was good. I loved the material…I was obsessed with it. I learned all eight scenes. So, when I read for Aaron and John Wells and Tommy, I had it all memorized. Aaron said to me, ‘You’re not going to use your book?’ and I said, ‘No, no, no, I want to put the book aside, so I can act.’ And he read with me. I said, ‘You’re going to read with me? How are you going to watch me and read with me?’ He said, ‘That’s the way I do it.’

“So, Aaron and I acted those eight scenes together. It was thrilling. I finished that audition on a high and I knew I had done my work. And…as an actor, that’s all you can do. Because the choice is somebody else’s and the most control you have over the situation is to give the best example of your craft as possible. Ultimately, that can get you the job…and it may not get you the job. But I felt very positive about it. By the time I drove back to my house, the offer was already on my telephone machine.”

If you think the casting of Leo McGarry represents the perfect match of actor to role, you’re in good company—so did John Spencer.

John connected with his West Wing counterpart in a personal way, as both men were open about their battles with addiction. Each knew well the costs associated with losing that battle, and each found solace through service to others and in a devotion to his respective vocation. “Like Leo,” John told the Associated Press in 2000, “I’ve always been a workaholic, too. Through good times and bad, acting has been my escape, my joy, my nourishment. The drug for me, even better than alcohol, was acting.”

Indeed, for all of us who had the great good fortune to work with the great, good John Spencer, it is not hyperbole to say, as Mary has more than once, that the man was “touched with genius.” We’ll talk more about him later—here in the book and for the rest of our lives—but for now let’s return to casting director John Levey’s backyard.

Remember those very special rosebushes we mentioned earlier? They originally belonged to John Spencer. Transplanted from his home following his passing, they were gifted to Levey as a token of appreciation and affection from John Spencer’s off-screen family. A constant and beautiful reminder of an actor, and a man, who was nothing if not constant and beautiful.

Sigh. Breathe. Okay. What’s next?

JOSH LYMAN

Once the chief of staff is named, an incoming president—in consultation with his newly minted right-hand man—goes to work nominating cabinet secretaries, senior-level administrators, and envoys. The West Wing, though, was light on these kinds of officials. Its action, after all, centered on the White House, not the State Department or the office of the ambassador to the Federated States of Micronesia. An indispensable player in the Bartlet administration was deputy chief of staff (and resident political enforcer) Josh Lyman.

Levey brought in several actors to read for the part of Josh, but Brad Whitford had an edge. In 1990, he had appeared in Aaron’s Broadway play A Few Good Men, which would eventually be adapted into the blockbuster film starring Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and this one random Lakers fan. During the Broadway run, Brad played Lieutenant Jack Ross—aka “the Kevin Bacon part.” Years later, Levey would recall that Aaron “wanted Brad somewhere on The West Wing—either Josh or Sam,” but that they expected to see a bunch of guys who’d been in A Few Good Men or were just “in Aaron’s world.” Speaking of…

(MELISSA FUN FACT: Tim Busfield—The West Wing’s Danny Concannon, Washington Post columnist and C.J.’s de facto goldfish deliveryman—appeared in the Broadway play, too. Josh Malina was in the original cast and both he and William Duffy [the Larry half of “Ed and Larry”] did the national tour. Oh, and it appears Malina successfully pestered Aaron into putting him in the movie!) But back to Brad…

As the Broadway production of A Few Good Men went on, Brad and Aaron really hit it off. And, naturally, Brad had quickly fallen head over heels for Aaron’s writing. But…the course of love never did run smooth. And the course of this love—of his friend, of a TV script, of a role, of a collaboration that would change his life—ran all the way back to New York City and a 490-seat theater on West Fifty-Sixth Street.

“I was doing Three Days of Rain—the Richard Greenberg play—at Manhattan Theatre Club,” Brad told us.

At the time, Aaron was in New York, too, camping out at the Four Seasons while he put the finishing touches on the first draft of his Sports Night pilot. As Brad’s brother, David Whitford, would reveal in his wide-ranging personal profile of Brad for Esquire magazine, the night Aaron finished writing the script, he found himself taking refuge from a rainstorm—and printing a copy of the script—at a local Kinko’s. “The first place I took it,” Aaron confessed, “was the stage door at Manhattan Theatre Club, because I wanted Brad to read it.”

But, as fate would have it, Brad was already spoken for. With a baby on the way, and an ABC sitcom called The Secret Lives of Men (and its twelve-episode order) in hand, Brad broke it to Aaron that he couldn’t do Sports Night. Saying no to his friend had been painful at the time, but in hindsight Brad considers it a fortuitous decision. After all, if he had landed on Sports Night, he wouldn’t have been free to do The West Wing.

Ultimately, upon hearing about the cancelation of Brad’s show—after just six episodes—Aaron phoned him, offering his condolences and, he hoped, something of a consolation prize. “I want you to play Josh on The West Wing.” He sent over the script that afternoon.

It was a script—and a role—that seemed tailor-made for Brad. His own innate mix of playful and fiery was a perfect profile for Josh, who, more than any other staffer, would be called on to muscle through the president’s agenda, like a bulldog with a backpack.

Right in the band gazebo, that’s where the President’s going to drape his arm around the shoulder of some assistant DA we like. And you should have your camera with you. You should get a picture of that, ’cause that’s gonna be the moment you’re finished in Democratic politics. President Bartlet’s a good man. He’s got a good heart. He doesn’t hold a grudge. That’s what he pays me for.

—JOSH TO CONGRESSMAN KATZENMOYER, “FIVE VOTES DOWN”

“Reading the pilot,” Brad told us, “I was blown away. It was this…stunning…beautiful piece of writing. I just thought, ‘I love this character, I love this guy, I share his politics. We share a personality!’ ”

Obsessed with winning the part of Josh, he recognized that navigating the audition process would require next-level prep. “I had done A Few Good Men,” he told us, “and I knew you’ve got to get the words in you, so you can forget them and just think the thoughts.” So, for two weeks he’d walk up and down Beachwood Canyon and go over the material, to get it locked down.

“I remember thinking how pathetic it was. I’m alone up in a canyon…totally off book for days. I was trying to make it completely airtight,” Brad explained to us, “because sometimes you walk into auditions and, like, frogs fall out of your mouth. I just over, over, over, over, over, over, overprepared.” (MELISSA: Yep. Seven “overs.” We checked the transcript, triple-counted.)

It’s worth mentioning here that some brilliantly talented actors struggle with Aaron’s language. As Levey told us, they come in to read “and their mouth and brain just don’t function.” And some of them really are gifted actors. Levey acknowledged how his team was able to whittle down that pile of submissions: “One of the ways in which it was easy to cast The West Wing was that, if you couldn’t keep up with the pace, you were gone. There are many, many really talented people that just don’t have that facility for language and pace.”

This was not an issue for Brad Whitford.

“Early on we read Brad and confirmed Aaron’s certainty that he belonged in the show,” Levey said. “He understood the language, he could speak that speak, he could do it while he was walking and talking.”

On the day of the audition, Brad landed at Levey’s Warner Bros. casting office with his scenes memorized cold. He cut short any small talk with Aaron and Tommy—“Can I act now?”—and, for several minutes, just…channeled his inner Lyman. He raised his voice and raised his fists. He mixed a soft-spoken reverence for the president with a red-faced incredulity, turning to imaginary subordinates as if to say, “How am I the only one who gets this?!” He even strategically glanced down at the script to subtly convey that, “on the day,” when the cameras rolled, he could go even further.

By the end of the session, the three men watching him were in such hysterics that Brad wasn’t sure if he’d nailed the audition or pushed his performance into caricature. The confusion didn’t last long. Walking him out, casting associate Kevin Scott gushed, “Nobody has done it like that! Wow! Wow!” Brad drove off the Warner Bros. lot on a high.

He arrived home to Aaron’s voice on his answering machine. (MELISSA: “Answering machine”—aw…) Brad had, according to Aaron, “hit it out of the park.” All that hard work, all those days in Beachwood Canyon overpreparing, all those frogs not falling out of his mouth, all of Aaron’s effusive praise for the job he’d done—it felt amazing. Until it didn’t.

“I was told Tommy and John Levey didn’t think I was right.”

Tommy remembers it differently. While Aaron seemed thrilled with the audition, Tommy was just a bit hesitant about casting Brad so quickly. “He’s so funny, but Josh had to be the emotional center of the piece and I needed more than one audition to see that he had that too. It just felt a bit too fast, too quick.” Meanwhile, the casting director, as Brad remembers it, told his agent that he lacked two qualities Warner Bros. considered essential for Josh. That’s the nice way of putting it. Here’s how Brad says it actually came out: “He’s not funny. He’s not sexy.” (Years later it still stings, even as Brad laughs it off. “ ‘Not funny, not sexy’—thaaaaanks. Okay, I got it—I GOT IT—I don’t want the feedback!”)

While he sees the humor in it now, at the time the unexpected reaction was a WTF moment for Brad. He knew well that audition curveballs are part and parcel of being an actor—this is the business we have chosen and all that—but he still felt blindsided. Even as Aaron assured him that he’d “try and figure something out,” Brad knew his friend was in a tricky spot. Back then, he told us two decades later, he understood that Aaron didn’t have the kind of clout he would later enjoy. He wasn’t in a position to proclaim from on high whom he wanted for which part.

“I’ve been with my manager for a quarter century now,” Brad says, “and it’s because of this situation.” Indeed, when it came to getting her client the role he felt truly destined to play, Brad’s then agent, now manager, Adena Chawke, was like a dog with a bone. “I think she still has an email from John Levey that says, ‘What do you not understand? Bradley Whitford is not going to get this part!’ ” Pushing back against conventional wisdom, Adena refused to take “not funny, not sexy” for an answer. “It took a while,” Brad remembers, “but I got back into the mix.”

At one point during the cajoling process, Brad got called in for what purported to be a “chemistry read” with actress Moira Kelly. Considering her for the role of White House media consultant Mandy Hampton, the powers that be wanted a sneak peek at the dynamic between a possible Josh and Mandy—his ex-girlfriend, foil, and potential love interest.

Brad arrived at the casting office that day under the impression that he was there essentially as a facilitator for Moira’s audition. “I thought Aaron was shepherding me in and that I was just there, you know, kind of reading with her.” When he got home later that day, the news was not exactly what he was looking for. “The response was, I am totally out of the running because Moira blew me off the screen. I thought—I mean—I thought it was her audition! I was like, C’MON!”

But Aaron kept working his magic. Brad kept keeping the faith. And Adena Chawke kept emailing John Levey. Eventually, and at long last…the winds changed. At a gas station in Santa Monica.

Adena called—“I had a car phone, which was exciting”—and said, “You got it. Call Aaron.” So Brad called Aaron, who said, “ ‘I have great news—you’re in the show!’ ” (MARY: There was just this one thing.) “ ‘But you’re playing Sam.’ ” (MELISSA: That.) In other words, at least in Brad’s mind, he was being cast as…not Josh. He honestly couldn’t believe it, and he couldn’t understand why. Aaron tried to placate him: “It doesn’t matter who you are, I write for you. I’ll be writing for you!”

Still, Brad made his case, assuring Aaron that none of this had a thing to do with vanity, money, or seniority in the food chain of the fictional White House. His heartfelt appeal came from a deep-seated conviction of character: “I was like, ‘Look, I’m only going to play this card once: I’m not Sam, I’m not the guy with the hooker!’ ” Years later, it seems obvious—he wasn’t a Seaborn, caught up with a call girl; he was a Lyman, the bully to Bartlet’s pulpit, losing his shit and, as Brad put it to us, “chewing out the right-wing lady!”

Sitting at the gas station, Brad felt compelled to remind Aaron that Josh Lyman—that particular Josh Lyman—“is what you wrote, you told me you wrote it for me!” That said, as unsettled as he was, Brad had to acknowledge the absurdity of his objection. He’d just landed a plum role on a top show. This “Josh or Sam” conundrum was the epitome of a first world problem. “Of course,” he added graciously, “I’ll do whatever…” He trailed off.

That outburst might’ve played differently with another creator, possibly enough to take Brad out of the running for future projects. But based on their friendship, mutual respect, and understanding of each other’s instincts and talent, Aaron said he’d consider it.

We’ll get back to Brad and the “Josh or Sam” of it all in a bit (SPOILER: It’s Josh) and to how this earliest West Wing conflict resolved itself, but for the time being—and in the spirit of the show—let’s pass the baton over to the race for the would-be C.J. Cregg…

C.J. CREGG

The White House press secretary’s primary function is to act as a spokesperson for the executive branch, especially as it pertains to the president and his or her senior aides and officers. At turns charming and informative, wily and discerning, she is often seen as the face of the administration and a key public voice for its policy positions. One of the most prominent noncabinet posts in government, the press secretary interacts on a daily basis with global media outlets—digital, print, and broadcast—as well as “the Socratic wonder,” as Josh Lyman likes to call them, “that is the White House press corps.” Sizable slices of the world see this most public-facing member of the Communications Office as a polarizing figure. On The West Wing, though, she is often positively enchanting, periodically yukking it up with fawning reporters from the Washington Post and getting gifted things like goldfish and—depending on the president’s mood—compulsory Notre Dame baseball caps.

Oh, one more thing: Every now and then it falls on the press secretary to lead visiting children in song. This, despite her being (as C.J. will remind you) a National Merit Scholar who has “a master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley!” Yes, when C.J.’s not enjoying the home field advantage of the briefing room, there are times she’s forced to navigate (and support!) the hindquarters of at least one pardoned Thanksgiving turkey. There are times when she has an emergency “woot canal” and Josh dupes her into trying to say “Foggy Bottom.” And there are times she experiences stress-dream-level iffiness on the words to “We Gather Together.” (Meanwhile, she’s got “The Jackal”—an arguably more lyric-heavy song—down pat.) Somehow, though, C.J. always makes it work. That’s due as much to the words on the page as to the woman who brought them to mesmerizing life on-screen.

Claudia Jean Cregg and the actress who would make her an international icon share many admirable traits. A mix of quirky, quixotic, and quick on her feet, each is professional and revered, and both could be—or have been—compared to a 1950s movie star. But beyond the supersonic talent, beyond a breathtaking range of skill set, heart, and intellect that would stop an animal in its tracks (even on a wolves-only highway), beyond all that is this: They both have an appeal that just won’t quit. Ask anyone.

I like you. You’re the one I like.

—ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE ALBIE DUNCAN TO C.J., “GAME ON”

This simple line, courtesy of Hal Holbrook’s delightfully crotchety Albie Duncan, sums up C.J. Cregg as well as any eight words viewers of The West Wing ever heard.

To hear Martin tell it—like he did during a West Wing cast special on the talk show Ellen—Allison is everybody’s number one. “From the get-go,” he gushed to the program’s host, “she was our favorite. We would all be asked privately in interviews, ‘Well, who do you really like working with?’ ” According to Martin, each member of the ensemble would offer up a version of “Well, don’t tell anyone else”—they didn’t want to offend the others—“but she was always our favorite.” (On Ellen that day, the laughter and nods affirming Martin’s press-junket gossip suggested something like unanimous consent.)

But while perpetually winsome, Allison back then and Allison right now are, like the rest of us, different people. And now, thanks to her 2017 turn as LaVona Golden, the hot-mess mother in I, Tonya, she’s also an Academy Award–winning actress.

That said, even back in 1998, Allison enjoyed quite a following. During this period, her professional identity resided in the comfortable space between New York theater community cult hero and the moderate, manageable stardom of “What’s her name again? She should be in everything!” So, really, all these years later the acclaim hasn’t changed, in intensity or persistence. All that’s different is the crowd size. Point being, the moment The West Wing hit Allison’s doorstep, her star had already begun streaking across the sky.

“I was out in LA, shooting American Beauty and Nurse Betty, the Neil LaBute movie. Then I got a call about this pilot that Aaron Sorkin had written.”

Here’s the thing: Allison wasn’t looking to do television. (MELISSA: Until around the mid-’90s, the cross-pollination we see now—actors doing a feature here, then signing up for a limited television series there—didn’t really exist. Allison, at that time, was in the features camp.) Her eyes were fixed, understandably, on the road ahead, a road that was clearly rising to meet her and leading to what she hoped would be “a big movie career.” But, as she told us, “then I heard it was Aaron Sorkin, and that stopped me short.”

She was, of course, fully aware of Aaron from the New York theater scene, and she knew and admired what she refers to as “his pedigree.” Add to that the presence of white-hot TV vets like John Wells and Tommy Schlamme, and Allison’s agents were right on the money when they told her, “If you’re going to do television, this is the kind of television to do.”

For Allison, minutes into sitting down with the pilot, it was love at first press brief. “Reading the part of C.J. as she talked to the media about the president having ridden his bicycle into a tree, I was in. I just thought it was hilarious.” The allure of playing a character that typically delivered serious news—at times dead-serious news—alongside stories about “one of the most inane, stupid things a president could do, ever” was irresistible. “I just loved the humor…that fine line of being serious and knowing it was hilarious. Not funny…but funny.”

He rode his bicycle into a tree, C.J. What do you want me—“The President, while riding his bicycle on his vacation in Jackson Hole, came to a sudden arboreal stop.”

—LEO TO C.J., “PILOT”

The impact of the pilot script on Allison is especially remarkable, given the fact that she wasn’t naturally drawn to its subject matter. Having come of age during the Watergate era, raised in a family that discussed politics rarely, if at all, she didn’t trust politicians and never considered herself savvy when it came to the world in which they operated.

In addition to the cynicism with which she tended to view government, when she read the pilot, political scandal in the US appeared to have reached its most toxic depths. (If only.) It says something about the script, then, or maybe something about Allison, that she saw The West Wing as a harbinger of hope. Could this “palace” Aaron had put on the page give civil service an extreme makeover? As she said to us, “It seemed like a terrific way to put politics back in a good light. The staffers genuinely wanted to do the right thing. They just seemed to have their priorities straight.”

According to John Levey, Allison had come to the attention of the Warner Bros. casting department along the same route Dulé would travel months later during The West Wing’s search for Charlie Young. “My colleague and friend Kevin Scott brought in a demo reel of a tall and elegant, smart and funny woman who I didn’t know from Adam, for the role of C.J. Cregg. Her name was Allison Janney.”

At that time, as second chair to Levey, Kevin Scott regularly logged countless hours poring over video of actors the studio was not yet aware of, always on the lookout for undiscovered gems. “I had watched Allison in her various film roles,” Kevin told us. “They could have been roles where she had five lines. It didn’t matter who was talking—she didn’t have to say a word—your eye would automatically go to her. I was like, Oh my God, this woman is so damn intriguing, and so odd. And yet…beautiful-looking.” Yep, Kevin was hooked. And he wasn’t alone.

“She was so damn funny,” Levey still marvels to this day, “and so smart.” But it wasn’t just the funny, and it wasn’t just the smart. When it comes to Aaron and Tommy, the actor also needs to be fast. “Allison,” John Levey is quick to point out, “had all three.”

And then there was that celebrated banister moment from Primary Colors. In that memorable scene, Allison performs a perfect, and perfectly goofy, pratfall up a flight of stairs, a maneuver that risks coming across as cheesy and dangerous if not executed with exacting precision. Aaron was quite taken with this very particular set of skills because the early pages of the pilot just so happened to feature C.J. on a treadmill. In the midst of some inane, flirty chitchat at the gym, her beeper starts bleating. Flustered, she picks it up, fumbles a bit, trips…and goes flying off the belt.

Allison arrived for the first pilot audition of her life, in the words of Kevin Scott, “a nervous wreck.” Back then, Warner Bros. ran casting out of a single building, Building 140. There were twenty-plus casting directors working on numerous projects for the studio, which meant there were dozens of actors in the waiting room when Allison walked in. “She didn’t know what those people were waiting for,” Kevin says. “She may have thought they were all waiting for The West Wing!”

Despite her rising star, the burgeoning film work, and extensive theater experience, Allison came in and…freaked. “Her eyes were, like, bugged out. I had to hold her hand and calm her down in the waiting room: ‘It’s gonna be fine, it’s gonna be fine…’ ” To help slow her pulse, Kevin set the scene and Allison’s expectations for what she was about to confront. “You’re gonna go into the room and see John Wells,” he said. “You’re gonna see Aaron Sorkin, you’re gonna see Tommy Schlamme.” Only half listening, Allison nodded, took a deep breath, and, when her name was called, got up and headed in.

Looking back—20/20 hindsight and all that—Allison’s perspective on the way her audition went down is pretty comical. When we think about how uniquely perfect she was for the role, to the point that it seems now to have been written for her, it’s hard to fathom the bout of insecurity she experienced in the audition’s aftermath. Heading in to read for Aaron, Tommy, and John, Allison remembers, she felt nervous, of course, but also excited. Walking out, she recalls feeling…less so. “I was pretty sure they hated me.”

Now, to the uninitiated, the following may seem counterintuitive, but: When you audition for a role, you want the casting people, the director, the producers, to give you notes. If they ask you to perform it a different way, that’s not remotely a bad thing. In fact, what you really don’t want is for them to say, “Okay, great! Thanks!” (Translation: “Next!”) When the people in the room like what you did, they tend to give you an “adjustment,” to gauge your ability to “take a note,” in other words, to deliver the material with some contrast. Sure, sometimes you’ve utterly missed the point of the scene, and the generous (and smart) directors offer up a second swing at it. But most of the time, being “given direction” is undeniably a good sign. And, as Allison told us, “I don’t remember them giving me any direction or letting me know that they liked it—at all.”

It wasn’t just a lack of direction; it was a lack of…basic social norms. As Allison remembers it, neither Aaron nor Tommy made the usual small talk with her. “They didn’t ask me a single thing about myself, or what I was doing!” She laughs.

This is one of those Rashomon effect situations. We can attest as actors that sometimes you look at an audition through a very particular misery lens. The glass isn’t just half-empty; there was never anything in it in the first place. Allison remembers no one asking her a single thing…but Tommy is about the friendliest person in the world. He loves actors, is married to an actress, and is famously generous in auditions. “Allison was pretty nervous,” he told us, “I could see it. So she may not remember our conversation, but I sure do!”

Back in AJ’s version of events, when she finished reading C.J., it didn’t get much better. “They just said, ‘Okay, thanks.’ ” Allison walked out a bit bewildered—grateful for the opportunity, but, as she put it to us, “definitely feeling like, ‘Yikes! Not gettin’ that part!’ ”

Then she got a callback.

Flying back to LA from her home base in New York, Allison arrived feeling…cautiously optimistic, based on the fact that “this is the kind of part I love to play—strong women who are not without…awareness of humor. Smart, strong, funny women.” It was, as she said to us, “in my wheelhouse. I knew it was mine to lose.”

Oddly, though, even when she came back in to read for Aaron, Tommy, and the others, she remembers not a hint of shooting the breeze, no “Tell us about yourself,” no nothing. “And no notes on what I did!” she remembers now, with a still-puzzled incredulity. (MARY: Tommy weighed in on this too. “There weren’t a ton of adjustments to give her,” he says, “because Allison was so damn good.”) Sure, the role of C.J. Cregg was squarely in her strike zone, but in that moment Allison couldn’t help thinking, “I don’t know what these people want from me! Why do they keep bringing me in?!”

For whatever reason, they did indeed keep bringing her in. And when she returned to test for the network “in front of [Warner Bros. head of TV production] Peter Roth and the ‘ups’ at NBC,” as she calls them, there was an additional layer of stakes, one that came with serious career implications and a long-term commitment. Just like all the other series regulars—including Richard Schiff, who, more than any of them, was driven bonkers by the “business” end of show business—Allison had to put her cards on the table before the test. Because on the off chance a show gets picked up to series—actually…we’ll let her paint the picture: “You’re sitting in a room and you have to sign a contract in advance of the audition. So if you get it, bang—you’re committed for five years.” Bottom line, though, despite locking herself in for half a decade in the midst of a budding film career, Allison badly wanted to land this part. “I was afraid to admit how much I wanted it.”

Waiting to go in, Allison took note of her C.J. competition, as well as several candidates vying to make up the balance of Bartlet’s senior staff. The collection of actors milling outside the audition room represented a veritable murderers’ row of talent. “I thought to myself, ‘Okay, this is just a learning experience. I’ve got to go through this—like a trial, like something to be endured.’ ” Luckily, and right on cue, a familiar face rounded the corner with some encouraging words. It was her future co-star, in to test for Toby Ziegler.

“Richard came up and…I remember him being so nice to me. I think he said, ‘Well, if you’re here, I’m glad I’m here,’ which I took as high praise.”

In the end, the competition for C.J. came down to two distinct, equally formidable talents: Allison and CCH Pounder, an Emmy-nominated actress with approximately one billion credits, who was well-known to Warner Bros. and John Wells, thanks to her revelatory work on ER. (CCH would eventually join The West Wing cast as Deborah O’Leary, President Bartlet’s outspoken, controversial secretary of housing and urban development. It was a powerful and stunning performance, which appears to be the only kind she gives.)

As for Allison, to this day she remains convinced that she landed the role due in no small part to that Primary Colors pratfall every single one of you should’ve long since gone to check out on YouTube. “Aaron,” Allison says, “loves Mike Nichols and he loved that movie, and my first scene in the pilot I do a pratfall!”

Regardless of Allison’s theory, in comments to The Hollywood Reporter in 2014, Aaron made it crystal clear that, while choosing her may have begun with the facility she’d once exhibited for falling on her ass, it didn’t end there. “The only thing I’d ever seen Allison in was Primary Colors. She’d made an immediate impression on me with a simple trip on a flight of stairs. Pounder’s auditions were great, but looking back, it would be hard to argue we made the wrong decision casting Allison, who became the heartbeat of the show.”

“The heartbeat of the show.” Talk about high praise. And it kind of hits the bull’s-eye, right? Allison’s C.J. Cregg always came across as…steady. Dependable. The ever-constant big sister or favorite daughter everyone could count on—for a kind word, a kick in the pants, or an outlier view on a bump in the polls. But there was also this: While every one of the show’s main characters—and every series regular who played them—delivered his or her share of emotional lifeblood, in terms of sweeping, iconic “heartbeat” moments, we defy anyone to top C.J. for frequency or impact. And we don’t just mean the romantic fireworks and grapevine fodder of her will-they-or-won’t-they with Danny Concannon. She had poignant emotional moments with everyone. Hell, she even had them with herself.

Sobbing alone on a bench after Simon Donovan’s death, in the middle of Times Square and Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah.”

Lambasting Nancy McNally with her fiery, full-throated support for the women of Qumar. “They’re beating the women, Nancy!”

Quietly confessing to Sam that she knew he was the one who pushed her out of harm’s way during the assassination attempt in Rosslyn. “Sam…I think you have my necklace.”

Assuaging Josh’s guilt over the NSC card that he got—and that she (and Sam and Toby) didn’t—to secure him in the event of a nuclear attack: “You really are very sweet sometimes.”

Gently offering Toby a towel, some ice, and a sympathetic ear as he mourned the suicide of his brother…and lamented the fistfight he’d just had with Josh, his once and future comrade-in-arms.

And, of course…breaking the news to President Bartlet about the sudden, shocking death of his dearest friend and confidant, Leo McGarry.

MELISSA: Everyone always asks what it was like to work with Allison Janney, and the answer is…even better than you could imagine. It was a Friday night during season 2. We were filming the follow-up to “Noël,” an episode called “The Leadership Breakfast,” and there was one scene left to shoot. I had one line—as usual, Allison had the bulk of them—so I was enjoying a light workload. We went in for rehearsal, and Aaron stopped by, which always made me a bit nervous. You always want to do extra well when he’s in the room. But again, it was only one line. We ran through the scene, and it went fine, but just as we finished, Aaron said, “Yeah, I just don’t feel like C.J. would say all of that. We’re going to have Carol say this part.”

All of a sudden, my light workload on a Friday night just got a little less light! As we were walking out to our trailers to get into wardrobe, Allison clearly sensed my anxiety level. She leaned over to me and said, “Don’t be nervous. Get changed fast and come to my trailer. We’ll run it—you’ll be great.” That’s what it was like to work with Allison. Like a dream—and like a master class on every single take. (Oh, FUN FACT: That night when we filmed the scene, Aaron wound up not coming to set because he got called to the hospital for the birth of his daughter Roxie!) But back to AJ’s West Wing test…

When everything was said and done, Allison left the room (and the Warner Bros. lot) feeling all kinds of positive and some level of serene. She had stood tall and done her job the best she knew how. The rest of it, now, was out of her hands. “I remember going back to my hotel, and just…letting it go.” “Whatever happens,” she thought to herself, “happens.”

What happened is that the next day, Allison heard a knock on her hotel room door. She got up and opened it to a special delivery, a stunning bouquet of flowers. Not long after—as if it were scripted—the phone rang. It was Aaron. With a smile in his voice, he uttered the words she’d been hoping to hear:

“Welcome to The West Wing.”

In that moment, the soon-to-be “heartbeat of the show” skipped a few. From that directionless first read…to the chitchat-free callback…to the final test for the NBC “ups,” Allison had been putting one foot in front of the other and focusing on the task at hand: to breathe life into the wonderful words in ink on the page, to lift them up and show the powers that be her undeniable vision for an unforgettable C.J. Cregg. Then, at the sound of Aaron’s proverbial rolling out of the red carpet, reality began to sink in—fast.

“Oh shit,” she realized. “I gotta do this now.”

Postscript: When the West Wing pilot was being cast, there wasn’t enough material in the script for the actors reading Toby and C.J. to really show what they could do. Tommy approached Aaron, asking him to write an audition scene, any audition scene, featuring those two characters. He promised Aaron, “No one’s ever going to see this, we’re never going to do the scene. I’m never going to point a camera at the scene.” But a few episodes into the series, Tommy came to Aaron again, saying, “You know that scene you wrote for casting…” That scene—the one Tommy promised he would never point a camera at—wound up in “The Crackpots and These Women.” (C.J. tries to talk Toby down from feeling insecure about his place in POTUS’s pecking order.)

C.J.

Since when do you need help talking to the President?

TOBY

Since all of a sudden I became the kid in the class with his hand raised that nobody wants the teacher to call on.

TOBY ZIEGLER

White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler was the president’s chief speechwriter and the guardian of his better angels. Arguably the soul of the West Wing staff, Toby was undeniably its conscience. Alternately preachy and taciturn, gloomy and strident, he was a passionate idealist and the closest thing this White House had to a true believer. And however prickly he could get—and he could get prickly—Toby always seemed to find ways, subtle or otherwise, to wear his bleeding heart on his rolled-up sleeve.

We’re running away from ourselves. And I know we can score points that way—I was a principal architect of that campaign strategy, right along with you, Josh. But we’re here now. Tomorrow night we do an immense thing. We have to say what we feel. That government, no matter what its failures in the past—and in times to come, for that matter—government can be a place where people come together and where no one gets left behind. No one…gets left behind. An instrument of good.

—TOBY TO PRESIDENT BARTLET AND JOSH, “HE SHALL FROM TIME TO TIME…”

Scanning the internet for ways to describe Toby, one lands on a laundry list of quasi synonyms for…“difficult”:

Moody

Arrogant

Uncompromising

Self-righteous

Irascible

Contrarian

Prickly (see above)

Simmering

Mournful

Stubborn

Curmudgeonly

What follows, then, is a testament to the true greatness of both the character and the actor who would come to portray him: At the core of the messy jumble of humanity that is Toby Ziegler, one descriptor stands above all the others.

Lovable

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back a bit, to this irrefutable fact: Richard Schiff didn’t really want to do TV.

The year before The West Wing came calling, Richard had successfully auditioned for four different shows. Successfully enough, that is, to have been asked to “test” for them. Testing, we’ll remind you, is when you audition again—like an advanced callback—except this time the actor performs the material not only for the creative team, but also for the studio and network executives. This part of the process is nobody’s favorite. Certainly not Richard’s. “There’s a torturous nature to auditions. And I allowed myself the freedom to play it moment by moment and decide at the last minute whether I’m going to go in or not.” This tended not to endear him to casting directors and nearly got him blacklisted by NBC. To this day, Richard defends his tendency to pull himself out of the running at the midnight hour, especially as it pertains to reading for studio and network bigwigs.

“Their job is not to evaluate talent,” Richard argues. “It’s to evaluate what talent will sell advertising for them, and I’m not at the top of that list. So, it’s always been a fight.”

So, yes, more often than you’d think, Richard just…wouldn’t show up. That happened on multiple projects he’d nearly booked the year before. On the days leading up to the test, he’d listened to the voice in his head telling him, “I don’t want to do this show,” and it was…game over.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but this pattern didn’t sit well with Richard’s representatives, who—after one missed network test—tried to convey the dire consequences their client would likely face. “They will be fucking furious,” they told him. “If you don’t go in, you will never work for NBC again!” Sure enough, Richard recounted to us, “they were fucking furious, screaming bloody murder. They wanted heads to roll.” (A year later, of course, he was hired by NBC for The West Wing.) To be clear, none of this is a matter of Richard not caring enough about the work. If anything, he cares too much—about the art of it, the truth of it—to do work that fails to meet that standard.

When the opportunity to play Toby Ziegler came up, Richard was, as usual and rather fittingly, a bit tortured about it. Because, while all actors audition and want to get jobs, at that particular time what Richard really wanted was to do movies. (Wanting to do movies was, of course, also true for all actors—that is, until shows like The West Wing, The Sopranos, The Wire, and myriad other acclaimed and beloved programs came along, featuring film-worthy roles on “prestige TV.”)

Thanks to an exceptional script, and the fact that Tommy Schlamme was shepherding it along, Richard was intrigued. “He wanted to see me. We had worked together a couple of times before.” Prepping for the audition, Richard recognized the level of the material, as well as its potential to run for multiple terms of a single presidency. He recognized something else too. All things considered, he had a decent shot at landing the role of Toby, especially given his familiarity with Tommy and Tommy’s familiarity with him.

So, he went in for the first audition. The main “Toby” scene saw him dressing down Josh for his “smug, taunting, you know…calamitous performance on Capital Beat!” Diving into the confrontation, with Aaron reading Josh, Richard had no idea about what would become one of the cardinal rules of The West Wing. So, he did his “normal thing,” which was to “change stuff” and “improvise a little.” (MARY AND MELISSA: Uh-oh.) “I found out later Aaron was furious that I had the audacity to do that.” Turns out, it wasn’t disqualifying.

“We read a lot of people for Toby, and it was a great part,” John Levey told us. “Toby was like the Peanuts character Pig-Pen, but followed around by worry, instead of a cloud of dust.” A key to Toby, it seemed to Levey, was his tremendous capacity to see everything from both sides. “He understood a multitude of points of view,” which was, of course, a blessing and a curse. Luckily for Richard, the messy business of emotional and intellectual complexity is, to borrow a well-worn Sorkinism, “where this man eats.”

“Talk about being right for a part,” Levey marveled about Richard. “He is the embodiment of ambivalence. And that was perfect for Toby, just perfect.”

There’s a story Brad Whitford likes to tell—by which we mean he LOVES to tell (by which we mean he can’t stop telling)—that came up one time in, of all places, a memorial service for John Spencer. Brad got up to deliver a message from Richard. He said, “Richard sends his regards. He’s in New York doing a one-man show. And he hates everyone in the cast.”

There’s literally no one in the world that I don’t hate right now.

—TOBY TO SAM, C.J., MANDY, AND LEO, “FIVE VOTES DOWN”

You know the old adage “Nobody picks on my brother but me”? That’s why Brad can get away with saying stuff like that. In a very real way, just like their West Wing counterparts, Brad and Richard are almost like siblings. In fact, they first met thanks to Richard’s actual brother Paul Schiff, a film and TV producer who, back in his undergrad days, happened to be Brad’s roommate at Wesleyan University.

“He and my brother took care of my dog for six months,” Richard recalls. “So I was forever indebted to Brad for that.” (MELISSA: The dog’s name was Lyle and was, as Richard puts it, “a Manhattan mutt that got into a thousand fights and didn’t win one.”)

Given his long history with Brad, it had to have felt like kismet for Richard—a “sign,” even—when, upon entering the room for his callback, he spotted his old dog-sitter. “I walk in and there he is,” Richard would recall years later. “And he’s playing Josh! I just started giggling, it was so weird.” Indeed. As another famous West Wing Josh (Malina) points out, “Giggling is not something you would normally associate with Toby Ziegler.”

Despite the “church laughter” and the resulting fits and starts it caused both actors, Richard got through the callback relatively unscathed. He had come into this phase of the process—reading for the Warner Bros. executives—with Tommy’s assurance that it was “just a formality,” and had taken that mostly to heart.

When it was over, Tommy led him out of the room, reminding his future Toby that “tomorrow’s the test.” He added, “We hope to see you there.”

“Well, just so you know,” Richard replied, “I might not show up.”

Tommy nodded at this, not unkindly, but with a knowing smile. “Yeah, I’ve heard.”

“And if by any chance I do show up,” Richard volleyed back awkwardly, “…I’m going to be really bad.”

Tommy chuckled. “I’ve heard that too.”

What Tommy did next made a real difference to Richard and went a long way toward putting him “at ease,” or at least as close to at ease as Richard manages to get. It would also effectively set the course for the next several years of their work together. Tommy put a hand on Richard’s shoulder, looked in his eyes, and said, “I really hope you come tomorrow.”

“There was such love in that gesture,” Richard told us, “such an appreciation, a genuine appreciation for how crazy we all are—and no judgment. He must’ve been thinking, ‘You’re outta your mind! This is, like, the best show that’s come along—you’re not gonna show up?!’ But he didn’t do that. He just said, ‘I hope you do show up.’ ”

This would be the first of many times during the run of The West Wing that Tommy was able to do that for him, “to kind of disarm all of my neuroses and psychoses,” Richard would later reveal. It was quite a moment. But the moment wasn’t over. Walking out, Richard turned the corner to find a bunch of women mentally prepping for their auditions. “This,” he thought, “is for C.J.” Looking around, he spotted the brilliant actress CCH Pounder and, sitting nearby, another familiar face.

Allison Janney.

At the time, Richard didn’t know Allison all that well. He’d met her one night after a show in New York—“a little off-off-off-Broadway thing”—and remembered how great she’d been. “Then I saw her in Primary Colors.” Allison’s standout turn as a goofy, vaguely flighty adult literacy teacher (who would wind up having a “quickie” with John Travolta’s philandering presidential candidate) had wowed him that night and established the actress in Richard’s mind as truly special.

A year or so later, there she was, outside the audition, waiting to test for Claudia Jean Cregg. In that moment, Richard had a classic Richard thought: “I went, ‘Oh God, these guys will never hire her, they’re not that smart.’ ” Then again, he thought, “If they’re serious about her…they really know what they’re doing.” Allison’s presence that day was one more piece—along with the sky-high quality of Aaron’s script, Brad’s coincidental involvement, Tommy’s kindhearted insight—that contributed to Richard’s burgeoning excitement about the project and his chance to be a part of it. And, of course, we know he did indeed show up for the test.

As he remembers it, the audition for the NBC executives took place in a cramped little room, where everybody sat in rows, stacked up narrowly behind a single desk. “Like an album cover of suits.” Richard says he was “so bad, I started laughing in the middle of it and said, ‘I’m sorry, this really sucks. I suck today. Let me start again.’ ” But an hour later, walking across the lot to his car, a decidedly un-Richard thought came to mind: “I think I got this thing.”

A few years into Richard’s stint on The West Wing, at “one of three parties I ever went to in Los Angeles,” he was approached by a well-regarded performer whose talent he knew and loved. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this,” the gentleman said to Richard, “but I was the other actor that was up for Toby the day you tested, and I was one hundred percent sure that I got the part.”

When Richard asked him why, he was told, “Because I put my ear against the door when you auditioned and I couldn’t hear a fuckin’ word you said.”

That actor was Eugene Levy. (Given the staying power of Eugene’s career since the early days of SCTV, readers may know him as the Best in Show character who “wasn’t the class clown, but sat next to the class clown, and studied him” or the father in the American Pie series or, most recently, the dad on Schitt’s Creek. In any case, he’s tough to beat.)

As Aaron told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014, “Levy was fantastic—strong and sad and very compelling”—but for Tommy, casting Toby came down to, among other things, a matter of music. “Richard,” as he put it to us, “just played a different instrument.”

Still, according to John Levey, Eugene’s read of Toby Ziegler was truly remarkable. He calls it “the single funniest audition I’ve ever seen that didn’t get the job. He made the executives in that room at NBC laugh out loud eight or ten times!”

The problem—for Eugene, anyway—was twofold. First was the character’s intrinsic grumpiness, a quality that Richard Schiff has in spades and that Aaron had always seen as quintessentially Toby. Eugene Levy may have played the role brilliantly and with great humor, but Richard embodied it. Second, the creative team believed they could divine comedy out of other cast members—not Brad, of course, he was too busy not being sexy to bother not being funny—which meant they didn’t necessarily need Toby for comic relief. (Thanks to Richard, they would get it from him anyway, and more often than expected.) What they needed out of Toby, John Levey has rightly acknowledged over the years, “was cynicism and worry—and that was Richard’s corner of the market.”

Which brings us back to “lovable.” It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely what it is that drew so many of us—cast and crew and viewers alike—to the rumpled, cranky, brilliant humanity of Richard Schiff’s Toby Ziegler. Maybe it’s just too hard to choose. His tumultuous inner life forever simmering just below the surface, or his raw, steadfast affection for a woman named Andy. His occasionally volcanic insistence on speaking truth to stupid, or his quietly joyful epiphany that “babies come with hats.” His indefatigably brooding genius, or the fact that bouncing a pink Spaldeen against his office wall was the best way he knew to harness it. Maybe it’s just our sense that, more than any other character, Toby Ziegler seemed like the stand-in for The West Wing’s creator, its own “chief speechwriter,” Aaron Sorkin.

Whatever the case, one thing’s for sure: Tortured as he may have been at the prospect of “testing” for The West Wing, it’s a good thing Richard took Tommy’s words to heart and appeared at that callback. As Toby would later say, “The things we do in our lives—many of them are not voluntary.” This one, Richard, was voluntary. We’re really glad you showed up.

SAM SEABORN

“Deputy White House communications director” is something of a mouthful. Then again, “Toby Ziegler’s number two” doesn’t quite do the role justice and also sounds like the worst band name of all time. The deputy in the comms office operates as more than an additional voice in the room and on the page. He or she is a key political sounding board, a trusted counselor—around the West Wing and, at times, inside the Oval—and a true partner to the person in charge of the executive branch’s messaging apparatus.

Anyone who watched even half an episode of The West Wing saw Sam Seaborn as far more than just a dreamboat “Robin” to Toby’s brooding “Batman.” Aaron’s North Star muse for poetry and inspiration, Sam was the gleaming, unabashed romantic of The West Wing, its signature blend of innocent cockeyed optimist and charming quasi–golden boy. And if he got himself into trouble—by way of his mouth, his ego, a misplaced pager, or plain old hubris—odds were Aaron would bring his starry-eyed hero down to earth with a little comeuppance, like having his ex-girlfriend sleep with a professional hockey player or getting outdebated by Ainsley Hayes on a popular Beltway news program. Stuff like that.

MARK

The House is expected to vote next week on President Bartlet’s one point five billion dollar education package. Sam Seaborn: Why is this bill better than its Republican counterpart that the President vetoed last year?

SAM

Because it buys things that teachers need. Like textbooks. In a fairly comprehensive study that was done, an alarmingly high number of teachers—forty percent of the teachers in Kirkwood, Oregon, for instance, and Kirkwood, Oregon, being a fair model for public school districts across the country—forty percent of the teachers in Kirkwood, Oregon, report not having sufficient textbooks for their students. The package offered by the Republican-controlled Congress offered a grand total of zero dollars for new textbooks.

Moments later…

AINSLEY

The bill contained plenty of money for textbooks, Mark, and anyone who says otherwise is flat-out lying. And we should tell the truth about this. Textbooks are important, if for no other reason than they’d accurately place the town of Kirkwood in California and not Oregon.

—“In This White House”

As Toby’s second-in-command, Sam served as a subordinate but somehow equal member of the speechwriting staff and, eventually, as a senior advisor to President Bartlet. He also represented one of the public “faces” of the administration. And when it comes to faces, you could do a lot worse than trotting out Sam’s galactically handsome one to appear on shows like Capital Beat, no matter how bad he got his ass kicked that time. I mean, seriously. Say it out loud: “Sam Seaborn.” He even sounds good-looking!

Yes, “Seaborn” is a wonderfully evocative character name and brings to mind the metaphor John Levey has often used to describe the process of casting a pilot. He says it’s like putting together a mobile at the beach. The kind where you hang a seashell from an old piece of driftwood, and then you find another shell of equal-ish weight, and another, and another, or maybe a piece or two of blue-green sea glass, to balance it out on the other end. Suddenly all those shells and the sparkling sea glass, in orbit around the dried-out driftwood, don’t just look like they “go” together; they look like they need one another, like they complement one another—they look like they belong together.

“It’s why working on pilots is exciting,” Levey says. “Because, when one piece falls into place, when you get John Spencer, you get all the gravitas, all that realness, that sort of…unmade-bed-ness.” Then Rob Lowe walks in and, Levey explains, “he’s a completely made bed. His shirt is tucked in and his tie is well tied and always in place. He’s a real leading man.” For casting directors, those jigsaw puzzle moments feel like more than just magic. They feel truly—actually—creative.

Hard as it is to believe now, given the last twenty-plus years of his résumé, before joining the cast of The West Wing, Rob Lowe had never done a TV series before. His Sam Seaborn origin story began the day a junior agent at United Talent Agency sent him a copy of the pilot script with what felt, to Rob Lowe, like something less than high praise.

“She literally just said, ‘Read this.’ Not ‘It’s good,’ not anything, no backstory, no nothing.” In fact, when the actor saw the words “The West Wing” on the cover page, he genuinely thought it was the script for a spin-off of a popular syndicated show called Pensacola: Wings of Gold. “I thought it was gonna be about a fighter squadron!”

But then, just below the title he saw “written by Aaron Sorkin.” His eyes lit up. “Ohhh,” he thought to himself, “that guy.” His mind instantly went not to The American President or A Few Good Men, but to a lesser-known Sorkin work, credited to both Aaron and Scott Frank, the neo-noir medical thriller Malice. (This film was perhaps an early predictor of Josh Malina’s keen ability to enlist his friend Aaron’s help in landing acting jobs. In this case, he played the no-doubt pivotal role of “Resident.”)

As for the West Wing script, from the moment Rob sank his teeth into it, he was hooked. The first scene, set in a dimly lit DC bar, featured a journalist fishing for inside-the-Beltway gossip from the character Rob would eventually come to play for eighty episodes.

“Nobody had told me what part to think about when I read it,” Rob explained on The West Wing Weekly, but by the end of that first scene, he had his eyes—and his heart—set on Seaborn. “Maybe ’cause Sam was the first character, and that opening scene at the bar is so interesting. Maybe it was that I liked the name. ‘Sam Seaborn,’ ” Rob rightly points out, “had a nice ring to it.” Later in the script some guy called Josh Lyman showed up, which, Rob suggests, was another role he could’ve been right for. But there was something about Sam—his unbridled passion perhaps, a Kennedyesque penchant for soaring idealism and great hair—that he connected with, instantly and on a visceral level.

Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That’s my position. I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet.

—SAM TO MALLORY, “SIX MEETINGS BEFORE LUNCH”

For perhaps the only time in his career, Rob couldn’t help thinking he was the only person in the world who could play the part. “It wasn’t like, ‘How am I gonna play it, what could I do with it, this could be interesting, wow what an opportunity!’—it was literally ‘This is my part and I’m just gonna go in and blow the doors off it for these guys.’ ” That was the idea, anyway, and Rob Lowe had the capacity to sell it. But here’s the thing: One of “these guys” wasn’t sold on Rob Lowe.

With production on the pilot looming, some believed that the West Wing cast could still use a jolt of star power. While any number of the actors already on board possessed sufficient talent and charisma to carry a show, NBC still had concerns. An hour-long drama about public service—and public servants—remained a tough sell in any climate, let alone one as toxic as American politics in 1999. Adding another big name was a tried-and-true way of attracting eyeballs and keeping them on the network week after week.

Aaron saw things differently. To him the foundation of the show was the team—a story centered on a staff of hardworking civil servants, none of whom shone brighter than any of the rest.

Just north of thirty years old at the time, Rob had already enjoyed a long, successful, and high-profile career. He was a full-fledged movie star. He’d appeared in many popular films, ranging from The Outsiders and St. Elmo’s Fire to lighter fare, including Youngblood, Wayne’s World, and About Last Night. He’d acted opposite the likes of Patrick Swayze and Jodie Foster, as well as Martin’s son—and Rob’s fellow “Brat Pack” member—Emilio Estevez.

I grew up a few houses down from the Sheens. If you look back on your childhood, there’s always that one house you went to after school. For me, that was the Sheens’. Martin was like my second dad. He was the guy who let me bum cigarettes and steal his ice cream. Plus, I was this kid who wanted to be an actor and Martin was this acting giant.

—ROB LOWE, INTERVIEW FOR WHAT’S NEXT

Given that résumé, plus a pair of Golden Globe nominations to his credit, Rob Lowe was undeniably a star. But that was the problem. As Aaron would later reveal in The Hollywood Reporter’s piece “West Wing Uncensored,” he had no idea Rob was even coming in, at least at first. And even after learning that Rob’s manager, Bernie Brillstein, had convinced Kevin Scott to let his client read for the role, Aaron was determined not to cast him. “Tommy, John, and I were putting together an ensemble, and while it was all right with me that the president was being played by a movie star, I thought having one play Sam would throw the balance of the cast out of whack.”

Having fallen in love with the material, though, Rob was not to be denied. He still raves about that pilot script. “It’s amazing. And it’s every bit as good in its written form as it is in its completed form.” Truly enchanted by the Seaborn character, when it came time to respond to the creative team, Rob and his reps didn’t play coy about his level of interest. “I was like, ‘I’m in, I wanna be a part of this!’ ”

But in a moment of “not so fast,” he was informed that he’d have to come in and read for the part. “Everybody,” Rob was told, “is auditioning for this.” To his credit, rather than play the “I’m offer-only” card, Rob didn’t blink. He actually likes to come in and read. “I always feel like, ‘Wait a minute, I actually get to compete with the other people?!’ When I’m given the ammo to kill in the room, I’m all about it.”

The day Rob drove through the gates at Warner Bros. to read for The West Wing was, in his words, “rainy” and “horrendous.” Adding to the gloom, Bernie Brillstein had laid down the law for Aaron, Tommy, John Wells, and anyone else who cared to listen: Rob would read only once—and never again. As Levey put it to us, “He wouldn’t do chemistry readings with any other actors, wouldn’t test at the studio, wouldn’t test at the network…” What Brillstein was offering, the casting director explained, was a good old-fashioned Hollywood “go fuck yourself.”

Rob, on the other hand, was charm personified. Walking into a room packed with people he didn’t know, he introduced himself to Aaron—who, of course, would be reading opposite him, first as Leo McGarry’s daughter, Mallory. That scene involved a White House tour Sam was meant to give to “Leo’s daughter’s fourth-grade class” and climaxed in his big speech about having accidentally slept with a prostitute. Rob had the whole thing down cold but held the script because “you never want to have them think that they’re getting the absolute best. You want ’em to think there’s still more to come.”

Talking to us about his audition more than two decades later, Rob was still starry-eyed. “I loved auditioning with Aaron,” he told us. “I couldn’t wait to do it. He and I immediately—I honestly don’t think it’s an overstatement to say—fell in love.” As for Aaron…Remember how he initially pushed back against the idea of another movie star coming in and upsetting the delicate balance of his foundational West Wing ensemble? It took less than a page for that to go out the window.

“He read the first of three scenes he’d prepared,” Aaron says. “I don’t remember the second or the third because he’d already gotten the part a page into the first, and I was thinking of stories for a character who has no idea he looks like Rob Lowe.” (MELISSA: Just want to flag that Aaron’s dialogue in real life is as entertaining as the stuff he puts on the page.)

That scene, by the way, ends with Sam basically begging Mallory to “please, in the name of compassion, tell me which one of those kids is my boss’s daughter!” Mallory, of course, hits him with a deadpan “That would be me.” In the audition, as Rob landed on that moment, and on the scene’s last line—“Well, this is bad on so many levels!”—everyone in the room laughed. Hard. Then, as Rob tells it, “Everybody looked around at each other and it got really quiet. Nobody said anything.”

Then Aaron turned to John Wells and said, “See, I told you the scene was funny!” Moments later, Aaron said something else, something that sounded like surrender. A happy, sweet surrender: “Pay him whatever he wants.”

Of course, it wasn’t that simple—nothing ever is in Hollywood…

JOSH/SAM

Nostalgia is a marvelous thing. In terms of painting pretty pictures, regardless of the factual landscape, it’s undefeated. When it comes to puzzling together the who’s who of The West Wing, as clean a sweep as it may seem to have been, the messy business of casting the show really came down to the wire. Less than seventy-two hours before filming was set to commence on the pilot, Aaron informed Tommy, John Wells, and Warner Bros. that Brad had to play Josh Lyman, end of story. And the rest, as they say…is neither funny nor sexy.

Looking back at Brad’s heartfelt Santa Monica gas station moment, pleading his case to play Josh, it’s hard to miss the fitting serendipity at work in the casting of Jed Bartlet’s deputy chief of staff. While perhaps lacking in diplomacy, Brad Whitford, like Josh Lyman, stood his ground and raised his voice, proving himself the pitch-perfect man for the job. That impulsive, impassioned outburst perfectly captured the go-for-it spirit of the character, and of the actor who felt called to play him; a spirit articulated by Donna Moss, the woman who would come to know him best…the one who always loved him most: “Gather ye rosebuds, Josh!” (Plus, did you not see him hungover in Sam’s yellow foul-weather gear?! Come on, Tommy—if that’s not sexy, we don’t know what is.) As for the man who would be Sam…

Following Rob Lowe’s audition—his one and only read—in the time it took him to walk to his car, drive off the lot, and steer his way over to Lankershim Boulevard, the powers that be had called and offered him the part. Isn’t that a nice ending? It’s positively Sorkinian. Or it would be, anyway, except it wasn’t the end. For that, we’ll hand the reins to Rob himself. After all, he’s not actually a deputy communications director…but he plays one on TV:

“They famously couldn’t make my deal, so I took a giant pay cut to be in it, and we still weren’t anywhere near close to making a deal. When asked, they were like, ‘Well, we don’t want any stars. We don’t care about stars, we just want people who are great for the parts.’ So I cut half my price, they did not cut any of their price, and we agreed to disagree.”

(MELISSA: Just jumping in to say this—Rob told us that despite the public negotiations and the ongoing search for the perfect Sam Seaborn, privately he and Aaron were in back-channel communications throughout. MARY: They mainly connected via phone, though there was that time they spotted each other across the proverbial crowded room, having coincidentally reserved tables at one of LA’s hot-spot steak houses.) But back to Rob…

“I saw Aaron at the Palm as I was hearing through the grapevine that they were literally reading every member of the Screen Actors Guild—‘so-and-so read for Sam Seaborn, so-and-so read for Sam Seaborn’—and I was dreaming about the part every single night. At the Palm, we both practically had tears in our eyes, hoping that the bean counters could figure it out. Because at the end of the day, the only two people who mattered were already in love—the guy making the show and the actor playing the part!

“Finally, forty-eight hours before they were ready to start shooting, they came back to me. As I had met them halfway, they then met me halfway…and we made the deal. I signed my deal in front of Tommy Schlamme in Lyn Paolo’s wardrobe department, trying on my suits.

“I was fitted at five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, and Monday morning—I’ll never forget—we were downtown at the Biltmore, shooting the very first scene of the pilot. In the bar. We shot that scene and the sun hadn’t even come up yet when we were done.”

How’s that for an ending?! Shooting the first-ever scene of The West Wing in a downtown hotel bar before the sun comes up? Good, right? Okay. Who’s up? Ooh—Janel!

DONNA MOSS

“Welcome to the White House. My name is Donnatella Moss. I work here in the West Wing as an assistant to Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Lyman. Which I guess makes me Deputy-Deputy Chief of Staff.” (CRICKETS. Then…a lone, awkward, hilariously muffled cough.)

—DONNA TO WHITE HOUSE GUESTS, “AND IT’S SURELY TO THEIR CREDIT”

Months before her ascent to the self-proclaimed position of “deputy-deputy,” Donna Moss had joined the Bartlet for America campaign as Josh Lyman’s new assistant. (“When I said I was assigned to you…I may have been overstating it a little.”) Back then, Donna was an almost college graduate in shaky possession of roughly five majors, two minors, and one deadbeat med student ex-boyfriend, aka “Dr. Free Ride.” By the time the action in the pilot kicked off, she’d risen to “senior” assistant to the deputy chief of staff and, perhaps more notably, had established herself as one half of The West Wing’s Olympic gold medal winner, “Fan Favorite Couple” Division.

Donna was, of course, more than just the sum of her not-so-subtle swoonings over Josh and whatever it was he inscribed in the book he gave her for Christmas that time (Beckengruber’s On the Art and Artistry of Alpine Skiing, for those scoring at home). She was an assistant of such fierce loyalty that she’d venture out into the frigid night to call up small-town New England voters and beg them to pull the lever for Bartlet; a junior staffer willing to perjure herself before Congress in service to a decent man she deeply admired; a former student so devoted to her twelfth-grade English teacher that she tried to get the man in the Oval to issue a presidential proclamation on the occasion of the woman’s retirement. (MELISSA FUN FACT: The educator in question, “Mrs. Morello,” was named in honor of West Wing writer Eli Attie’s real-life social studies teacher at Hunter College High School.)

To be clear: Donna’s love for her boss was hardly unrequited. Who can forget Josh’s periodic feignings toward dismissiveness when it came to his loyal assistant’s social life?

JOSH

Can we clear up a few things about my level of interest in the revolving door of local Gomers that you see in the free time you create by not working very hard at your job?

Over the years, in addition to proving herself an invaluable West Wing staffer (and, ultimately, rising up the chain to become chief of staff to first lady Helen Santos), Janel’s delightful, layered Donna was far more than a budding love interest. Representing the Bartlet administration, she found her way from DC to fifty percent of the Dakotas and also took an ill-fated trip to Gaza. (Speaking of, if you ever doubt Josh Lyman’s heartfelt pining for his beloved assistant, we’ll direct you to the overseas beeline he made to her bedside the second word came down that she’d been blown up by a roadside IED.)

The years-long arc of Donatella Moss is indelible for lots of reasons. Her sweet, funny, complicated dynamic with her boss was one, to be sure. And if you called her the heart and soul of the bullpen, we wouldn’t argue. But she was its eyes and ears too. Donna and Josh didn’t just flirt; they bickered—about each other, about social issues, fiscal policy…about the electoral nobility of swapping votes with a Ritchie supporter. And, because of that, more than any West Wing character, Donna was the wide-eyed, faithful stand-in for viewers across all seven seasons of the show.

But yes, our memory of this blond-haired, doe-eyed underdog will always be most closely tied to the “crush”-ing sentiment she could never quite contain for her boss. She managed to convey these feelings with the tiniest of gestures, the fleeting-est of looks; as much through the words she uttered as through the things she left unsaid.

The most idolized of Donna’s outspoken/unspoken love for Josh came in season 2’s “17 People,” in which she reveals the whys and wherefores of her bygone breakup with Dr. Free Ride. (Upon learning that Donna had been in a car accident, the guy headed over to the hospital to see her but stopped off along the way for a drink with some friends.) Appalled, Josh tells Donna, “I’m just sayin’, if you were in an accident, I wouldn’t stop for a beer.” Donna replies,…“If you were in an accident, I wouldn’t stop for red lights.”

I mean…come on. That’s the exchange you put in the Donna-Josh time capsule. But it takes more than just a special sort of actor to make these moments shine. Sometimes it takes the exact right person. And that exact right person was Janel Moloney. A root-able mix of sassy and sincere, her Donna Moss comes across as simultaneously vulnerable and plucky: outspoken, with a built-in, inescapable charm. As for her West Wing origin story, it goes back a ways—to a hostess stand, a psychic, and an assistant wardrobe supervisor (who is not to be trifled with) on a Sorkin joint called Sports Night.

In 1998, ABC viewers got their one and only look at Monica Brazelton, another fiercely loyal fictional underling, this one from the wardrobe department at a cable network called Continental Sports Channel. Helping outfit the on-camera talent for the ESPN-ish sports highlights show, Monica takes a moment to confront one of the anchors, Casey McCall, for failing to credit her boss during a promotional appearance. The assistant’s plaintive, empathetic speech was delivered by a little-known actress named Janel Moloney and showcased some of the bedrock values West Wing fans would come to know by heart: standing up for the little guy; giving credit where it’s due; speaking truth to power. These themes, which dotted the Sports Night landscape, would be easy to spot in any and every episode of the Sorkin show that would follow on its heels. Rewatching that scene now, and the actress who broke our hearts in it, you can’t help noticing a whisper of Donna Moss in Monica Brazelton. Which, eighteen months later, was good news for Janel, who would be called in to read for The West Wing. But there was one little problem.

“I had just quit acting.”

Back in 1999, Janel had been trying for more than a decade—deep into her twenties—to land more steady work in film and TV. She’d waited tables in twenty restaurants and been fired from fifteen. “I don’t know what was not right with me as an auditioner, as an actor,” she lamented to us, “but I worked so hard and I got so few jobs. I was busting my hump, buying a pair of sale shoes once a year…and I was like, ‘I’m almost thirty. I can’t be an out-of-work actress and an out-of-work waitress. I’ve got to do something more valuable with my life!’ ”

The problem, at least as Janel identifies it, was frustratingly typical for Hollywood, as wholly unoriginal as it was patently false. “Not pretty enough.” “Can’t play that girl.” “Not famous enough.” “Not sexy enough.” Nevertheless, thanks to her memorable turn on Sports Night, and because she knew John Wells and John Levey, both of whom she had auditioned for “a million times,” Janel found herself—in what she described to us as “the last gasp of my acting career”—walking onto the Warner Bros. lot to audition for the role of C.J. Cregg.

Oh yeah—for C.J.! Weird, right? Not really. It isn’t uncommon for actors to wind up in a different role from the one they were originally called in for. That said, Janel approached the audition with her expectations scrupulously well managed. “They asked me to come in and read for Allison’s part. And I felt not quite…substantial enough, as a presence. There was something about that character that needed a bigger personality. It just needed Allison, really.” Which is not to say Janel didn’t do a good job in the audition. She did. Just ask the guy who read opposite her.

“Aaron was reading with me…and he stopped me in the middle. And I think, ‘Oh, I’m bad.’ He said, ‘I just want to tell you, you’re doing great.’ Literally in the middle of the line! I mean, who does that?!” As Janel (and common sense) suggests, when you’re auditioning and it’s going well, the last thing you want is for someone to stop you. “Because,” as she says, “it’s really hard to do well!” After a moment, she looked at Aaron and asked, “Um…do I keep going?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Please. Go on.” So, she did. And it went fine. Better than fine. Everyone in the room—Aaron and Tommy and John, the Warner Bros. casting folks—they all liked her work plenty. She even got a callback. Except…

“The casting director told my agents at the time that they wanted me to read for a smaller part…a ‘secretary’…and there was no show commitment, just a one-off.” Still, they all hoped Janel would be willing to come in.

Okay, quick time-out for a key piece of the puzzle: As Janel told us, and as we can certainly confirm, that period in Hollywood was extremely teenager-heavy. “I went through two pilot seasons with barely any auditions because there were no adults in any of the shows!” So, a role written for a grown-up? And a chance to work again with Aaron and Tommy? (MELISSA FUN FACT: Tommy Schlamme was so moved by Janel’s Sports Night audition that he actually cried.) For Janel, it all added up to “What do I have to lose?”

So she went back in to read for this smaller, one-off role of some “secretary” called Donna Moss and…“I really loved the part. I really loved it. It was petite…but complete.” What she loved about Donna is what we all came to love about Donna: “There was sass and empathy, devotion and intelligence and bravery. She was,” as Janel put it to us, “completely there.” Which is another example of what she calls (what we all call) “the genius of Aaron.” As the old adage goes, “There are no small parts.” “You could have this part that they themselves may have thought, ‘Oh, this is not substantial.’ But it was the part that was meant for me because I felt it was very substantial.”

When she went back in to read, this time for Donna, Janel found the same array of faces as the last time. Due to the size of the role—the size they had originally thought the role would be, anyway—she didn’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops for network suits. There was no test. She just had to read Donna’s pilot scenes for Aaron, Tommy, and John, along with the casting team at Warner Bros.

“I still remember exactly what I wore. These really cute tweed slacks—like a nubby gray, tweedy wool—and a black turtleneck, and I had my hair long and down and, ya know, I looked like…Donna!”

One standout memory from her callback is that she did “this really superdorky thing.” The audition, she told us, included “this little scene with Josh in his office, where I’m…basically empowering him.” From the pilot you may recall the guy needed some empowering. Representing the administration on one of the Sunday morning news shows, Josh had gone after Mary Marsh, a hot-tempered, high-profile evangelical with an axe to grind. As a result, for most of the episode it appears that President Bartlet might actually fire Josh. Wearing fiercely loyal on her sleeve, Donna seethes: “You won that election for him! You and Leo and C.J. and Sam!”

“There’s a little bit of emotion,” Janel told us, “so before I did that scene, I turned my back on them to center myself and breathe.” As John Levey revealed on the podcast, while Janel was familiar to all of them, from Sports Night and otherwise, casting her came down to simple competition: “She just won that part.”

Which is not to suggest there wasn’t luck involved—or, we should say, good fortune. As Janel concedes, “If my part had been the part that it became, I would never have gotten it.” Heck, if from the get-go Donna Moss had been, you know, Donna Moss, she “may never have been called in at all.” Oh, and speaking of good fortune, wasn’t there something about a psychic?

Ohhhhhh yes. Yes, there was. Right around the time Janel had decided to quit acting, she went to see the sister of her friend, actor Hank Azaria. “Hank’s sister is an amazing astrologer,” Janel told us, “she’s the real thing.” (MELISSA: ’Kay…) “She’s also a little bit psychic.” At this point in our interview Janel said, “You’re gonna think it’s a lie, but I literally have this on tape.” (She does.)

At the reading, Hank Azaria’s possibly-somewhat-psychic astrologer sister said, “I’m looking at your chart and you’re just about to have this opening.” She then gave Janel a fourteen-day window—between this date and that date—saying, “Because you’re an actress…it’s probably an audition. It’s going to change your life. It’s gonna be political…and it’s gonna be…huge. It’s going to affect people in a really deep way. It’s important.”

Given the diligence Janel has always exhibited, the place where she learned she’d been cast as Donna Moss is hardly surprising. “I was hostessing at Il Pastaio in Beverly Hills. I checked my voicemail from the hostess stand.”

Looking back, even Janel has to admit, the psychic story sounds like “total bullshit.” And it does, right? Until you realize that the day she got called in to read for The West Wing fell between the exact two weeks the astrologer had given her three months before.

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear, though. Janel got cast as Donna Moss not because it was “in the cards” but because she’d proven herself to be right for the part, thanks to having done a bang-up job in the audition and in another role for the same creative team a year or so before. She got it because she’s good and because all those days and nights splitting time between auditioning and working at the hostess stand paid off. There’s nothing remotely “meant to be” about it. Except…

Remember when Aaron wanted Brad to be in that half-hour he’d just written called Sports Night? Guess which character Brad was going to play. Casey McCall. Yes, one way or another, come hell or high water, Janel Moloney was going to get her chance to chastise Brad Whitford on-screen. These two were inexorably drawn toward each other, and nothing—not rain or snow or time or space—was going to stop them. Not even red lights.