London Calling

Although best known for playing speechwriter Toby Ziegler in hit TV series The West Wing, Richard Schiff also has a wealth of big screen experience. As his latest movie, East End comedy The Infidel hits cinemas, Schiff tells us why he loves working in the UK.

In every walk of life, there are people who achieve success and are content to sit back on their laurels. Actor Richard Schiff is not one of these people. He could have lived off his Emmy award-winning character Toby Ziegler in TV hit The West Wing, yet his enthusiasm for new projects remains huge. With parts in British films The Infidel and Made in Dagenham in the bag, Schiff sat down with movieScope to chat about his table readings with Pacino, late ‘90s Spielberg intervention and the acting techniques he has employed over the years.

• Which actors first influenced you when you started out on your career?
I became curious watching late night TV from the ‘30s and ‘40s when I was a kid. People like Spencer Tracy, Bogart, Cagney, Cooper together with Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. Aaron [Sorkin] modelled a lot of his writing on Sturges and Capra; I think that’s why The West Wing was such a good match for me.

I saw Dianne Wiest on stage in my 20s. She was phenomenal and then I got to work with her [on 2001 film I Am Sam]. I told Al Pacino, ‘You’re the reason I got into this’. I’m sure he’s heard it before. Pacino goes to sleep acting or talking about acting; he goes into hibernation, then wakes up and starts talking about the scene. He lives and breathes this stuff. I did the first reading of Glengarry Glen Ross with Jack Lemmon and Pacino. It was a movie that I came very close to being in and I was watching Pacino. He was surfing. He did nothing for 10 or 12 pages, then he’d find a way to ride that wave of pages. Then the wave would die and he would go into neutral. He is the purest actor I’ve ever met and thinks of nothing else.

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This article continues in movieScope Magazine, Issue 16 (March/ April 2010)