Inauguration

Sorkin: Pretty much up until The West Wing, our leaders had always been portrayed in popular culture as either Machiavellian or dolts. But I thought, "What if we show a group of people who are highly competent, they're going to lose as much as they win, but we're going to understand that they wake up every morning wanting to do good?" That was really the spirit behind The West Wing.

Whitford: I used to defend the show from the charge of sentimentality or wish-fulfilment, because I think if you do go into the Obama White House you will find six or seven people around him who are true believers. We make these people climb this filthy rope and then we stand at the bottom and say, "Hey, your hands are dirty!" To show heroic, progressive, democratic politics at work was more than I ever expected.

"Aaron's very sticky about using precise language. It's in his contract: you have to use what he writes!"

Sheen: As we started, all of us knew what a powerful project it was. But we weren't sure that it would be a success on commercial television. We weren't sure we could sell cars and pharmaceuticals and who knows what with this kind of show.

Lowe: The thing at the beginning, before anybody saw us do it, was, "How funny is it or isn't it?" One of the first publicity shoots was in the Oval Office and I was the last person to walk into the room. When I got there they had Martin standing on top of the Resolute Desk with his hands up in the air making a Nixon face with the victory sign. The rest of the cast were on their hands and knees below him looking up. I said, "What the fuck is going on here? Why is fucking Martin on the desk, acting like Nixon?" And they go, "Well, we want to really highlight the comedy of the show." I was like, "You know what? If you're going to take this shot, you're taking it without me," and I left. People truly did not get what this show could be.

Schlamme: Those were very difficult days. The shooting was longer and we were going over-budget. It's a new show and every new show does this, but it was a new show about politics and we're doing everything that people said wouldn't work with political shows. The worst thing you could do with a political show is take a side, because now you've alienated half your audience.

Sorkin: Television from its inception had the number one goal to alienate as few people as possible. That's why if you look at 1950s, 1960s American sitcoms, the characters don't live any place in particular, religion is never discussed, politics is never discussed, you never really know what anyone's job is; nothing that could make these people seem different from you is ever discussed. All of a sudden on The West Wing, we're hearing the same words that we hear when we're watching the news or reading the newspaper. It needed to sound real and the characters – because more often than not the conflict was going to be a conflict of ideas – had to have opinions.

Lowe: The show is unapologetically liberal. That said, I think the best argument I've ever heard for cutting tax rates in the highest brackets, Sam Seaborn says in an episode of The West Wing ( see video below). And I know Republicans have used that clip of me talking for years. Ainsley Hayes had amazingly articulate conservative speeches. So I think, regardless of your political point of view, there was something for everybody.

Whitford: People always say, "Could it have been a show about a conservative Republican administration?" No! Nobody wants to watch that! Watching Republicans flirt makes people queasy! What are you going to have? The music swells and I'm high-fiving C.J. in the Oval Office saying, "We're building on protected land! We got a tax cut for the gazillionaires!" It would not work.

Wells: We did have Republican fans and some of my favourite letters are actually from very well known Republican figures who would regularly write to complain about a position but would say, "Hey, loved the scene with C.J.." Or, "The cheese thing made me laugh, but you're dead wrong about the highway to nowhere in Alaska, that's a very useful economic use of two and a half billion dollars." They complained bitterly but they never missed an episode.

Sheen: I did not always agree, personally, on the positions that Bartlet took and I argued against them on many occasions. One in particular was the death penalty. A guy in one episode was on death row and Bartlet had a chance to stay the execution and he did not. He let him be executed. I argued against it. 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.

Sorkin: I do enjoy the fact that we don't have a king or queen; we have a person with a very unusual temp job for a few years. My favourite moments on the show were always showing the intersection of the person and the job. Any time Bartlet could be something other than the president – a father, or a husband, or a son, or a friend.

Hill: A lot of the father and son dynamic that happened on the show was already happening with Martin and I off-camera. I still remember when I first came to the set and Martin introduced himself. He taught me this handshake that Laurence Fishburne taught him during Apocalypse Now.

Stockard Channing (Abbey Bartlet): I was making a movie in Calgary and they'd juggled the schedules so that I could go hiking way up in these mountains. I got a message from my agent saying, "Change your plans, you're going to Los Angeles." I literally had hiking boots on and a big woolly coat. I got to Los Angeles and of course it was 95 degrees. They stuffed me into an evening gown and dumped me on set and there was Martin in white tie and tails, sneaking a cigarette. I said, "Well, I guess we've been married about 25 years. Nice to meet you!"

Sheen: The relationship between Bartlet and Mrs Bartlet was very genuine, very loving. Stockard Channing is a great, great lady and we had a lot of fun together.

Channing: A lot of it had to do with this odd chemistry that he and I had – people bought our relationship immediately. It's very unusual to see the relationship of two people of that age in an intimate way.

Sheen: The thing that, oddly enough, I loved her the most in was Grease. But it was the one thing she would not talk about! She was not at all interested in Rizzo, the head of the Pink Ladies.

Channing: There's really nothing to be said for that whole phenomenon. It was just a summer job as far as I was concerned.

Wells: Early on there were a lot of network notes. "Could it be more of a soap opera?" "Could it have more sex?" And we always said, "Well, you know, people who work in the White House have sex, but it's not about the President having an affair with the Deputy Prime Minister of Germany!"

Hill: I'll never forget the first time Elisabeth Moss kissed me on screen. It was season one and she had to pin me up against a wall in the lobby of the White House. We didn't rehearse it at all and when we did it, she sure enough laid one on me, boy. [Laughs] I was like, "Well, ok, this is going to work out just fine."

In This White House

Janney: We were rock stars in Washington! Everyone was just so thrilled to be represented in such a positive light. It was thrilling to go there and be invited to the Correspondents' Dinner and be invited into the White House. It was a very heady, exciting time.

Hill: We were filming on the set one day in DC and Madeleine Albright comes by the set. I mean, when does that happen? You turn around and there's the former Secretary of State just sitting there. After the Clinton administration finished we were filming right outside the White House and John Podesta comes walking up while we're out there filming. Just strolling by the set – the former Chief of Staff! Things like that would happen all the time. John Spencer would always say, with a big smile on his face, "You wouldn't be experiencing this if we were on a cop show."

Lowe: I remember my first time going into the Oval Office was with Clinton. He had a Big Bertha golf club leaned up against the wall and eBay up on the computer.

Hill: The first White House Correspondents' Dinner that we went to as a cast, the President wanted to meet us beforehand. We were all in this room at the hotel and when the President came in, Martin bowed. Like, a royal bow to the President. And the President did the same thing back to him! It was one of the coolest moments ever to see the President, the leader of the free world, come in and bow right back to Martin Sheen with a big smile.

Schlamme: I had been lucky enough to have spent two nights in the White House during the Clinton administration before West Wing even came about. I slept in the Lincoln bedroom; it was an extraordinary experience. Being there the next day and going to meet the President in the Oval Office and waiting in what was our Mrs Landingham's office for him, I saw people coming and going and the excitement of that. When we were doing the show I wanted the audience to feel what I felt when I was sitting there, which was that they might have been just ordering lunch but it sure felt important to me.

Sorkin: The walk-and-talks were all Tommy. He recognised that I was not really writing anything of visual interest at all, and that he was going to have to provide that. So suddenly an eight page scene that took place in someone's office, he would come to me and say, "Can I here, on page two, move them out to grab a cup of coffee someplace? And I'll have them walk around here, then they've got to pick up this file of papers here, and make their way back to the office".

Schlamme: I thought his language had motion, so why not get people up and have them say that language while they're also moving? It was driven by the idea that there is no wasted time. If you went from one place to another, that had to be a meeting!

Sheen: Everybody had to be precisely in frame, in focus and together and remembering your lines and hitting your marks. The cameraman is walking backwards and there's always the danger he could trip and fall. Which happened many times.

"The walk-and-talks were driven by the idea that there is no wasted time. If you went from one place to another, that had to be a meeting!"

Janney: I fucking loved it! I loved walk-and-talks. There was a fluidity and a continuity to the scenes. You were in a relay race and if you had to come in on the third hallway pass and you fucked up, it was like, "Oh my God!" It was this really exhilarating game and the perfect way to keep a show about politics active, exciting and fast-paced.

Schiff: Plus you had actors that came from live theatre and it felt like you're doing a play. Every time we did a three or four minute walk-and-talk, the exhilaration of going on stage would be a part of it.

Lowe: Trying to execute that kind of intricate staging at the same time you're doing intricate dialogue – it's like patting your head and rubbing your stomach!

Schiff: If you go to the real West Wing it looks like a boring law office; there's really not a whole lot going on. The moulding is frayed, the carpet is a little dirty; it's not exciting. But the set design, by putting windows in the Roosevelt Room for instance, they created this maze of rooms that you can see through. The bullpen has glass, where the writer's bullpen in the real West Wing is on the bottom floor and it looks like a series of closets.

Sorkin: We put more glass onto our set than is actually in the White House so the camera would have a longer throw and, again, there was more visual interest. Our set was a fairly good replica of the White House; the Oval Office an exact replica.

Lowe: There wasn't a day that went by in four years were I didn't walk on that set and feel a sense of awe. I had my favourite times: like when it was decorated for Christmas was amazing; when the Oval Office was lit for sundown or early morning, it was amazing. I've never been on a set where I was happier to be than that West Wing set.

Talking Points

Sorkin: I got into [dialogue] because my parents began taking me to see plays from when I was very young. Too young, often, to understand the play I was watching: Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf when I was nine years old; That Championship Season when I was ten years old. But I loved the sound of dialogue; it sounded like music to me and I wanted to imitate that sound.

Sheen: Aaron's very sticky about using precise language. It's in his contract: you have to use what he writes! It was poetry couched in politics, but it was poetry for the common man. It made us feel that our thoughts and our emotions and our hopes and fears could be expressed in a more lofty way and be no less human. He has that extraordinary gift of making ordinary people speak in an extraordinary way.

Janney: Usually there's a script supervisor who will let you know if you screw up. On this show, in addition to the script supervisor, there was someone who was on the book and if you missed one letter, they would come up to you. I don't do my best work if I'm worried about missing a syllable, so I made sure that when I came to set I knew my lines cold!

Schiff: I had been used to improvising and even in the audition I was feeling free to rearrange Aaron's words a little bit, as lovely as they were. I didn't find out until after I got the part how furious Aaron was at me for doing that. They said, "He was livid. He did everything in his power not to jump down your throat!" But I came to realise that Aaron was writing in metre and the rhythm of the language is very important.

"If you go to the real West Wing it looks like a boring law office The moulding is frayed, the carpet is a little dirty; it's not exciting."

Sorkin: They learn that very quickly. And they do contribute a part of themselves to the script – just not new language. Sometimes they'll come and say, "This series of words just sounds strange coming out of my mouth." And I'll make some kind of adjustment the way you would if someone was buying a new suit. But they know themselves. They'll go between takes and say, "I can tell I'm dropping a word or something is out of order." They know, and they want to do it right.

Schlamme: Just besides how smart Aaron's stuff is, really, is how visceral it is, how sensual it is. Not sexual, sensual. Always tactile. When you read his scripts, the scripts read fast and the words almost jump off the page.

Whitford: There were times in that second year when it was just unbelievable, the scripts that were coming out of him. You know, they were plays coming out every week! As an actor you always feel like you're swimming upstream, and then it was like, "Oh God, I'm surfing now!"