- He did that a lot, where he would kind
of protect me that first year.
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A great early memory I have is just a few days before shooting
started, Tommy came into my office and said,
listen, I want to show you an idea
that I had for the opening.
We can take you through this room and through Josh's bullpen
and then through here.
We'll just casually walk through the Oval Office
with no preamble.
Once I started seeing Tommy's vision for the show,
I really started getting chills.
And I just wanted to be as good as that was and as good
as the actors were.
One of the first things that I remember on the show
was meeting Martin Sheen.
It was right outside the Oval Office, if I'm not mistaken
and he said, I'm going to teach you
this handshake that Laurence Fishburne taught me
when we did "Apocalypse Now."
He taught it to me, now I'm going to teach it to you.
In that moment, it really calmed all of my nerves.
And I just couldn't believe that I was there,
and I just did not want to mess up being with these actors.
The memories associated with "West Wing"
are in two categories.
There's the prank, silly category,
and then the creative, amazing, mind-blowingly
lucky categories.
And the category of luck was just,
there were so many, that you kind of can't even remember
them all, but I remember I did a long walk and talk, kind
of my first big scene in the show,
and Brad asked me if I wanted another take.
And I said yes.
And then he kind of asked for another take for me.
And he did that a lot where he would
protect me that first year.
So I have a lot of those types of memories.
There's a scene where Yo-Yo Ma plays the Bach cello concerto.
He started improvising, and Dule, who's an amazing tap
dancer, started tap dancing along to his improvisation
in the midst of shooting one of the most
meaningful episodes of television I
ever got to be a part of.
That was, nothing beats that.
We would do table readings of all the scripts.
And as the show became more popular,
more and more people would try to come
to these table readings.
And I remember the day Brian Williams, the newscaster,
brought his entire family.
And there's a scene where Dule Hill picks up the phone
and realizes that Mrs. Landingham
has died in a car crash.
And there was an audible gasp, and people
were sobbing and so upset.
And the poor Williams family's didn't
know what the hell to do.
I think one for me was my first interaction
with John Spencer.
That was an intimidating room to walk into.
It was just daunting to see the entire cast of this show
that I had already become a huge fan of.
And John made his way over to me.
And so he said that he was a fan of mine from "Sports Night."
Whether it was true or not is immaterial.
It was just an immediate sort of warm feeling,
like this guy's, this guy's good.
We've been doing these podcasts for "West Wing
Weekly," Josh Molina's podcast, and I remember
talking about an actor whose name I never forgot,
whose name was Tom Quinn, who was behind the kiosk
as I was looking for the brother of the veteran who had died.
And when I mentioned his name, his children
contacted me and were so grateful that I acknowledged
how wonderful their dad was.
And he was actually a veteran and a lovely actor.
And he had passed, but it was really
touching that I was able to make them feel
proud and happy for a moment.
You know, stuff like that.
There was one scene that I remember very well.
I had to give a specific set of numbers
and had to toss them out to everybody.
And I remember asking Aaron Sorkin,
I said, Aaron, the numbers are really long.
I mean, they're, they're, they're,
I mean, you really have to be, do I have to be exact?
Do I have to give them exactly?
I mean, I could just pretend I'm signing.
he said, no, no, Marlee, you have
to fingerspell them correctly.
So I did it like as best as I could with the numbers,
and it was really stressful.
But all in all, my time where was, I mean, it was great.
Every time I would come to work, it was great.
I said I would take the show, and then I
found out I was pregnant.
And so when I joined, I think I was
three or four months pregnant.
So it's, I just acted and they would try to cover it up
with you know, they'd let out my pants and I would carry boxes.
You see a lot of raincoats over the arm,
a lot of sitting behind desks.
And then they called me like five days after she was born.
He said, well, how good do you feel?
And I was like, hmm?
They were like, how would you feel about coming into work?
So I came back with Margaret seven days after she was born,
which was, it was just nice.
I mean, everyone got to hold her.
Seven days old, I have Martin holding
her and Brad and Alison.
So many people after the show over the years
that have come up to me and say, because of "The West Wing,"
because of Charlie, because of Sam, because of Josh,
because of CJ, I went into political science,
I went to, now I work in government.
It's happened so many times with people here in this nation
and in nations abroad.
So it's impressive to me and I think
I appreciate the fact that the has had that kind of effect.
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