Interview: Joshua Malina on How The West Wing Inadvertently Led Him Back to Broadway in Leopoldstadt

Joshua Malina — known to TV audiences as Jeremy on Sports Night, Will Bailey in The West Wing, and David Rosen in Scandal — had wanted to audition for Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt when he first heard it was coming to Broadway last fall. And yet, despite his impressive resume, theatrical background (he made his Broadway debut in A Few Good Men), and cultural history, Malina couldn’t even get seen by the production team.

Cut to several months later and the show’s search for a replacement for original cast member David Krumholtz as Hermann Merz, the ensemble work’s central figure. Malina took a Zoom meeting with director Patrick Marber, and within seconds, they were discussing The West Wing. And the rest, as they say, is bashert.

Malina joined the cast of Stoppard’s heartbreaking Holocaust drama, about the way history decimates the lineage of a once-prosperous Jewish family from Vienna, and not only is he grateful for the opportunity, but he’ll never forget it, either.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Tell me about your first encounter with Leopoldstadt.
I knew that I was going to have a Zoom meeting with Patrick Marber, who’s directing it, and so I think I read it about five times, to try to be able to appear intelligent enough to discuss the text. When they did offer me the role, I knew I was going to accept, but I flew to New York and saw the play twice in two days and was just very taken with it.

It’s a heartbreaker.
Yeah. I’ve been warned that it is physically and emotionally difficult to do this play eight times a week.

That’s a good challenge.
The whole thing absolutely has been a challenge, and I usually really don’t like a good challenge. I usually gravitate to whatever is easiest. But this was one of those once in a career, if you’re lucky, opportunities, so I was certainly going to go for it.

Do you consider yourself a theater guy?
I came up doing theater as an amateur. My first professional job was in A Few Good Men on Broadway. And then I found it very difficult to get my second professional job and I gave up maybe sooner than I should have and moved to Los Angeles. I started to get TV work, and the next thing I knew, I had kids, and daddy doing theater would mean working every night at bedtime. The years and years passed and making a living was a priority and I got some very nice opportunities on TV and sometimes in film.

I did a play for the first time in decades this past summer, the world premiere of Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank in San Diego at the Old Globe. I had the time of my life, and I know it’ll sound like a cliché, but it reminded me of why I wanted to be an actor in the first place. I had a ball.

What is it like to rehearse Stoppard in front of Stoppard? Is it scary? Is he scary?
He, as a person, is not at all scary. He, as a concept, I find scary. I walked to rehearsal a few days ago and to my surprise, saw Patrick and Tom Stoppard standing outside. I hadn’t steeled myself for meeting him, but within 30 seconds, he was hugging me rather than shaking my hand. It’s still daunting to have to perform his words in front of him. The stakes felt extremely high. I’m trying to keep reminding myself to enjoy the process.

For me, Stoppard has always loomed large. My dad and Manny Azenberg, a producer, have been best friends for decades. I grew up in New Rochelle, and because of my connection to Manny, who was like an uncle to me, I got to see tons and tons of amazing theater. I went to the opening night of The Real Thing in 1984, which would have made me 18, and that was my first exposure to his work. I remember being blown away, like, “Who is this playwright? What is this material?” It’s pretty heady to think that nearly 40 years later, I’m actually going to be on Broadway in a play of his.

Has the “I’m back on Broadway” sensation hit you yet?
For sure. Just because I’ve had so many fond memories. It was both a blessing and maybe on some level a curse that one of the greatest jobs of my entire career was my very first job, thanks to my friendship with Aaron Sorkin. Again, I grew up going to Broadway plays and wanting to be in them from a young age. At 23, thanks to Aaron having written A Few Good Men, I was living the dream. It’s taken me a long time to get back, but I immediately had those feelings walking into the theater. Knowing that you’re going to be in a play is a very special sensation.

Do you see any similarities between Stoppard’s style of writing and Sorkin’s style of writing?
Absolutely. And also, when I finally did get offered this role, I wrote to Aaron almost immediately and said, “I know I haven’t worked for you in 20 years, but I think you’re still getting me work.” I wanted to audition for the original cast of Leopoldstadt and my agents came back and said, “They don’t think you’re right for anything.” And I was like “Anything? Aren’t there like two-dozen Jews in this piece?” I don’t know what it was, but I couldn’t even audition.

When my agent said that they wanted to talk to me about maybe replacing David Krumholtz, I already knew they didn’t think I was right for it. And then, a few minutes into the conversation, Patrick Marber was talking about West Wing, and I thought “Wait a minute, now I know why I’m here.” I think he felt that if you have a facility for Aaron Sorkin’s kind of language and dialogue, that it might transfer well to Stoppard’s work. Sorkin and Stoppard characters tend to be hyper articulate and intelligent, and those are all things I can fake.

As a Jewish actor at a time when things are so fraught for the Jewish community, what does it mean to you to be doing this play now?
It’s deeply meaningful to me. I also think there are going to be a lot of people sitting in their Broadway theater seats watching this play, possibly judging the complacency they see on stage, and maybe, by the time they leave, they’ll judge their own complacency. It’s hard to track the shifts of culture and politics and history as it’s happening, so we might feel very secure with our lives now, but times change and things turn, and we’ve certainly learned that antisemitism and other forms of senseless hate are not a thing of the past. So it’s deeply meaningful for me to be part of it.