“Collider:
Did having a season of this show under your belt make returning to
the pacing and dialogue any easier for Season 2?
THOMAS
SADOSKI: It is simultaneously both. It is challenging. It always will
be. We’re operating at a high level of difficulty, when you’re
working on Aaron’s words. That being said, I think we came into the
second season having a lot more confidence and ownership over the
show and over the characters that we were playing, and having an
understanding in our bones of what the style is for the show. We had
a confidence that we could get it done because we did a season of it
already. There was a much more relaxed feeling, and definitely a
feeling of ownership in the second season. It didn’t come off as
relaxed, it just felt like we were more settled in. We’ve gotten it
into our bodies now. Yeah, it was still real hard work, but it was a
little bit easier than it was in the first season. We weren’t
killing ourselves in our own heads about, “Oh, god, can I do
this?!” We knew what we were getting ourselves into. We’re
veterans of Aaron Sorkin now.
Is
this type of dialogue exhausting to do, all day?
SADOSKI:
Yeah, it’s 16 hours a day. I don’t speak a lot when I get home,
during the season. It’s great. I just get to sit and listen. My
wife gets to tell me whatever she wants to tell me, and I don’t
talk. I’m too exhausted to talk, so I’m a very good listener.
…
What
was it like to play Don Keefer, this season? Did he feel any
different in Season 2, or did it just feel like a natural progression
of the character?
SADOSKI:
Well, the thing with it is that I never saw Don any differently, from
the very beginning. I didn’t go into the season thinking, “Okay,
Don is a bad guy. He’s a jerk. He’s a douche.” I saw Don as a
fundamentally good person who, when we meet him in the first couple
of episodes, is in a moment of great crisis. He is losing his job.
His relationship with his girlfriend has been on again/off again, on
again/off again for the better part of three or four months, which is
not a particularly long relationship. And then, all of a sudden,
she’s like, “And now it’s time for you to meet my parents.”
He’s quit his job and he has started a new job, and in that new
job, he’s told, “You have to get X number of viewers, right out
of the gate, or you’re fired,” so there’s a lot of pressure on
him there. And then, on top of it all, his old mentor has come in to
replace his old position, and brought her staff with her. She’s
running around telling everybody that the way he was doing the news
was awful.
It
was pretty condescending and there was pretty biting criticism of
Don, in the first season. On top of everything, this girlfriend that
he has, who he’s trying to work out this relationship out with, on
top of all this other work stuff going on, starts having this wide
out in the open emotional affair with this other guy who just walked
into the newsroom. That’s pretty stressful shit! There was a lot
going on with the poor guy. I would be a dick under those
circumstances, too. So, I never really thought of Don as being a bad
guy. It was heartening for me, as the season progressed, to see other
people come around on the character and say, “Oh, he isn’t such a
bad guy.” They gave him a shot and, by the end of the season, a lot
of the thinking on the character had turned. At this point, we’re
settled into who this guy is. I was really happy with the twists and
turns we got to take this year, with the character.
SADOSKI:
Olivia is a really good friend. I love working with her. She’s a
lot of fun to spend time with on set, and I think that we work really
well together. For whatever reason, that’s something that Aaron
picked up on, last season, and we got to share some scenes together
this season, too, which is always a good time. It’s really
interesting. I like those two characters, precisely for the reason
that the banter between them is different, in some way. These are two
people who are very restrained with each other, and who are trying
very hard to pretend like they’re not flirting, even when they are,
or deny themselves the joy of flirting with each other, even though
they want to. There’s a great restraint and tension that’s
created by that, that’s a lot of fun. You’re also dealing with
two characters who are totally socially inept, and there’s
something beautiful about that. They’re socially inept in a really
charmingly aloof way, and not a goofy way. The relationship that the
two of them have with each other is a lot of fun to work with, and
it’s great to work with Olivia on it.
…
Have
you ever thought about, if ACN was a real news network, whether you
would actually find yourself watching it?
SADOSKI:
I think I would. I think I would watch it as much as I would watch
anything else. Since working on the show, I’ve become much more
discerning about where I get my information from, and I make sure I
get it from multiple sources. I don’t just trust one place with all
of it. I think that I would definitely spend some time watching ACN.
It would definitely be part of my news diet.
More
than just the effect that this show has on where you get your news
from or how you watch news now, does it also affect the way you see
the people who deliver it and the people behind them who are
responsible for getting it done?
SADOSKI:
Oh, absolutely! I have so much more compassion for journalists and
the work that they have to do, in order to do the jobs that they have
to do. I am much more in awe of and am celebratory of great
journalism when I see it, and I’m much more critical of bad
journalism, or crap masquerading as journalism. It’s not something
that I frankly spent a whole lot of time thinking about, before I
started working on this show. I have always been politically active
and vaguely dissatisfied with the state of news, but I wasn’t sure
why. And working on the show has made me invest in that question a
little bit more, and look into why I had those feelings. Through that
investigation, and through the time that I’ve spent talking to and
being around journalists, it’s really enlightened me, as to how
hard it is to do the job and how important the job is to do well.”
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