Bradley Whitford is risking his livelihood — and now with all the MAGA loons on the loose, his safety — to do the right thing.
We’re in a crowded café on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on a chilly Saturday afternoon in March, and Whitford’s talking about the final season of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which premieres this week on Hulu. He plays Commander Joseph Lawrence, the irreverent architect of Gilead — a dystopian America run by whacked-out white Christian nationalists and their wives, who, after toppling the U.S. government, enslave women, torture them, mutilate them, rape them and steal their babies. Whitford is making it plain that he thinks we’re on our way there.
It’s a strange coincidence that the pilot for “The Handmaid’s Tale” was shot during the 2016 election, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was alive and Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land, and that now, what started as a horror fantasy about the subjugation of women by terrible, fanatical, power-hungry perverts might well be coming true. We don’t wear bloodred cloaks and white-winged bonnets yet, but there isn’t a woman in America, whether they’ve seen the show or not, who doesn’t know what that image signifies.
It made sense, in 2018, that the show’s creator, Bruce Miller, would cast Whitford in the role of the messy, absent-minded Commander Lawrence in Season 2, because Whitford is better than anyone at working the humor in drama and the drama in humor. He’d done it in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” the year before, playing a grinning liberal dad who was as good at garden-party chitchat as he was at transplanting the brains of his white friends into the skulls of Black people.
Whitford would have done a fine job as an off-beat villain for the entirety of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” But by Season 6, Lawrence has evolved into one of Gilead’s secret revolutionaries, ambivalent as he may be. Whitford wishes that someone in our own world would follow suit.
In part, he blames his former and current network bosses for enabling the destruction of our democracy and the dismantling of our Constitution. “It’s interesting,” he says, “especially when you look at all the people who I’ve worked for over the years lined up at the Trump inauguration, staying silent while their daughters’ rights are being torn away.”
Today, he’s wearing Commander Lawrence’s black-framed glasses, and his thick, silver hair is askew. “It’s the end of democracy, and the planet’s on fire,” he says dryly. “But we’re focused on a renaissance in shoe comfort and cosmetic dentistry.”
This is what Bradley Whitford does: He says something gruesomely true, and then adds a smart-ass remark. It’s what makes all his characters — from White House deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman on “The West Wing” to the trans woman Marcy on “Transparent” to Commander Lawrence on “The Handmaid’s Tale” — multidimensional and surprising. It’s why he’s been nominated for eight Emmy Awards and nine SAGs, winning three and two, respectively. And it’s undoubtedly why he was cast as Allison Janney’s husband in the next season of the slapstick political drama “The Diplomat,” playing a reluctant first husband to her president of the United States.
He leans in toward me and smiles a pained smile, and I can see swirls in his white beard where he’s been twirling it in a self-soothing way. Though spending time with him is like hanging with an old friend you haven’t seen in, say, 40 years, and you have that much to catch up on, culturally, politically and personally — he says he’s not himself: He’s angry and he’s fed up. “You know, misogyny is at the reptilian brain stem of these right-wing Christian white nationalists. It’s punitive. And, man, I’m pissed at all the people I work for. Like, ‘FUCKING. SPEAK. UP,’” he says.
He picks up a white mug of black coffee. It hangs there in his hand.
“I mean, if you run Disney, which I guess I work for now, I’ve sat through” — here, he imitates a studio head before the death of DEI — “‘We really care for you and want to make sure you have access to health care.’ Speak the fuck up!” he yells, this time loud enough for everyone, even through the din, to hear.
“And Jeff Bezos,” he continues, “fucking speak up!”
I ask Whitford if he’d ever say anything to the people he’s worked for if and when he came in contact with them, and he points to my tape recorder and says, “I mean, you know, I’m happy to say it here.”
And he goes on: “I don’t want to be a punk attacking, but I would really like to ask Jeff Bezos — who, when I worked on ‘Transparent,’ was talking about the importance of supporting this vulnerable community who has been turned into a political football — ‘What the hell is happening here?!’”
But Whitford knows exactly what’s happening. “A year ago, there were 65,000 pregnant rape victims without access to abortion care,” he says. “Now it’s way up from that. This is not a drill. It’s not a story. This is happening. Margaret Atwood said that she almost scrapped the book a couple of times because it seemed too far-fetched. Turns out Margaret Atwood’s an optimist.”
Bradley Whitford was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1959 to a much older father who worked in insurance and later became president of the Dane County chapter of Planned Parenthood. His mother, a harpist and a published poet, asked that her obituary describe her as a “proud atheist,” and became a Quaker “because she didn’t want some goddamn man in a costume telling her what was holy.”
Whitford speculates that he became an actor partly because of a regular occurrence during his childhood that imprinted on him the “full range of human experience.”
“My dad had night terrors and went to bed early,” he says. “So I grew up in a loving home with my mother playing absolutely gorgeous harp music every night and my father down the hall screaming in his sleep.” He lifts a berry from a small bowl to his right and holds it between two slim fingers.
Whitford has always been insecure about his acting — and doesn’t trust a confident actor — but he’s also always been brave. After graduating from Wesleyan and then Juilliard, his first role in New York theater was in a 1985 Off Broadway production of Sam Shepard’s “Curse of the Starving Class,” where he had to squat nude onstage and pick up a live lamb. He had salmonella poisoning one night, and so this move — squatting and lifting a farm animal — could have ruined his career. “It would have been the only thing known about me,” he says. “Like, ‘Wow, he shit himself at the Promenade in front of Kathy Bates!’”
But he didn’t shit himself (though he did have to urinate onstage), and therefore his career survived — or, more accurately, thrived.
When playing the Waspy douche with a sweater draped over his shoulders two years later in “Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise,” he met a fellow theater buff, actor Timothy Busfield, and they’d go to one-acts together. In 1989, Busfield was cast in Aaron Sorkin’s play “A Few Good Men,” and he thought Sorkin should cast Whitford too. Sorkin hired Whitford as an understudy and eventually gave him the lead when the show moved over to the Music Box. It was Whitford’s first Broadway gig.
“My dressing room was bigger than my apartment,” he says. “They had a 24-hour doorman there. I moved my dog, Luke, in, and I lived there and had this incredible experience. I think Aaron trusted me. We sort of got each other. I understood his voice.”
So much so that Sorkin wrote the part of Josh on “The West Wing” for Whitford. (There was a moment when Sorkin told Whitford that he was going to cast him as Sam Seaborn instead, because the network was having trouble negotiating Rob Lowe’s contract. Whitford didn’t want that part, and, in an act of impudence, told Sorkin, “Aaron, I’m not the guy with the hookers!”)
“I’ve tried to cast Brad in pretty much everything I’ve done,” Sorkin says. “For starters, he has two things that an actor can’t fake: An actor can’t fake being smart, and an actor can’t fake being funny. Also, he’s a great company member. There are some actors who keep to themselves when they’re on set — they’re in their head, and that’s their process. But with Brad, it’s a party.”
Janney, who played press secretary C.J. Cregg on “The West Wing,” says that when she would arrive on set and hear the crew laughing, she’d think, “‘Brad must have done something funny. What did Brad do?’ He’s just naturally hilarious,” she says. “He can make a joke last all day.”
In anticipation of being interviewed for this story, Janney asked an ongoing “West Wing” group text thread to give her a word or two describing Whitford. “All love,” someone shot back. Others wrote, “Courageous,” “generous,” “brilliant,” “hysterical,” “committed,” “passionate,” “moral,” “a tireless warrior for what’s right.” Richard Schiff, working on a play, wrote, “I’m in tech and just happy Brad isn’t upstaging me.”
It was on “The West Wing” that Whitford met Elisabeth Moss, 17 years old at the time, who played the president’s daughter, Zoey Bartlet, and would, nearly 20 years later, star in “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
“I was so nervous around him,” Moss says about working with Whitford then. “I was so young, and I didn’t feel like I could be friends with him, you know? I didn’t feel like I could josh around with him, pun intended.”
Whitford, who was married to “Malcolm in the Middle” star Jane Kaczmarek at the time (and is now married to Amy Landecker, whom he met on the set of “Transparent”), found that Moss had “an odd poise and clarity” and “comfort in her own skin.”
“So I see her go out and become this engine of the Golden Age of television dramas,” he says, referring to Moss’ award-winning roles on “Mad Men” and “Top of the Lake.” It was partly to work with Moss that Whitford sought a guest role on “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the second season. “And then I get to work with her again, and it feels … parental.” He appears puzzled by this feeling, though it’s not surprising, since he has three grown children. “I always loved Lizzie, but I didn’t realize that I would have this feeling of pride about her.”
Here’s where working with Moss on “The Handmaid’s Tale” turned that parental pride on its head: Whitford had no idea how strong she could be, and how that strength would change his life.
Actors, according to Whitford, are “pawns” — passive, submissive and voiceless, for the most part — and so are handmaids.
For Moss’ character, June Osborne, being stripped of all agency left her curled on a closet floor wishing for the end of her life. But being a woman with “a pathological inability to be defeated” (says Whitford), June picked herself up and began a revolution.
At the same time that this was happening in front of the camera, Whitford watched as Moss, in a fit of “unconscious Method acting,” began to immerse herself in the production of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” piling onto her job as star of the show, and director, a 24/7 involvement in producing, including casting and working with writers. “It would be like if Meryl Streep directed ‘Sophie’s Choice,’” Whitford says.
So it turned out that Whitford’s sweet paternal pride toward this very powerful woman was a little inappropriate.
“I was proud of her like a dad, yeah, and there was a kind of condescension about that,” Whitford says. “I’m not immune to some sort of ‘I’m the man, and this is a younger woman, and look at me — aren’t I wonderful that I’m so proud of her?’”
Whatever that was for Whitford and Moss at the beginning of their relationship on the set of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” it worked for the series: Paternal pride can look a lot like misogynistic condescension when it’s coming from a dangerous creep like Commander Lawrence, who, according to Miller, “is interested in humanity, but not in humans.”
June did not wither when patronized by Lawrence, though, and as the friendship between Moss and Whitford deepened, so did the relationship between the handmaid and the commander, which was being written as the show went along. Eventually, June and Lawrence became comrades in arms.
“June was blowing on the spark of Lawrence’s redemption,” Whitford says, “and I found myself personally very inspired. I was like, ‘Holy shit! She’s leading me!’”
(There’s a scene in which Lawrence is ordered by Gilead’s overlords to rape June, whom he’s never touched, in front of his fragile wife, Eleanor. If they don’t provide proof of ejaculation that night, all three victims — Lawrence, June and Eleanor — will be killed. It’s a gut-wrenching scene, where Lawrence sits devastated on his bed, his wife weeping behind a curtain, while June kindly talks him through how the rape will go, and what Lawrence will need to do, mentally, to survive it.)
For Whitford, especially after this scene, his partnership with Moss became “as great a collaboration as I have ever had in my life.”
Moss agrees. “We got very close,” she says. “I think that relationship between June and Lawrence would be an iota of what it is if it weren’t based on the friendship that Brad and I have. When you have the amount of respect and admiration for someone that I have for him, and you do a scene together, there’s just no way that it’s not going to have depth.”
Moss pauses, and then says, “I’m gonna text him and tell him, ‘I just made you sound like a fucking god.’”
Today, in the café on the Lower East Side, Bradley Whitford is, as he puts it, “June Osborne-ing it.” He’s putting our country ahead of his life by pointing out the hypocrisy of the most powerful men in media and entertainment.
“We feel this despair,” he’s saying, “because we feel we have no agency over what’s happening to us in this country. And June is a reminder that your agency will not be given to you: You need to fight for it. It’s part of what’s so wonderful about that character — she’s prodding people to embrace the power that they have.”
He sits quietly for a moment, seemingly spent, and then says, “I don’t care how political I sound. I wish fucking Jeff Bezos would sound a little fucking political.”
Then he says to no one in particular, and to everyone, “Speak the fuck up.”
From Variety US