You need to be real enough to be believable, but you don't necessarily have to be real enough to be real. There is a distinction.

I did not always agree, personally, on the positions that Bartlet, character from the West Wing, took and I argued against them on many occasions. But Aaron Sorkin said, "Martin, that's you, that's not Barlet. It's a very political decision he has to make." I found from the very beginning that when I infused my own personal feelings about an issue it went against the grain of the character.

My joke about Aaron Sorkin is that The West Wing was a great show about democracy, run by Kim Jong-Il!

I am an old, old friend of Aaron Sorkin's, who is the executive producer and writer. He had been talking about doing a political show for a long time and I had been interested in it for a long time. The moment I became available, he called me last year and asked me if I wanted to do it and then I just had to audition for the powers that be, and I got it.

Whatever you do, make sure you want to write more than you want to be a writer. Make sure you want to act more than you want to be an actor. That is what will sustain you.

When you act, you're always playing a version of yourself. You can't bring more to the role than what you are

Aaron is a very passionate, maniacal writer so the scripts really come from him, but he is very open to... y'know, we'll plan ideas and we'll certainly tussle about stuff when the script comes out. So, to a certain extent, he's very interested. If there's some problem or something that doesn't ring true, he wants to know why and he wants to correct it or fight for it.