Characteristics
in Common
He smiles when
he describes the president’s character: “It’s me. Originally,
when I took the part, I knew he was probably a Democrat, a liberal
and an intellectual—things I identify with. Trust me, I do have
Republican friends. But no matter who this president is, an
actor wants to know what makes the character tick. And that’s
what Aaron told me: ‘He’s you, Martin. Make him you.’”
Acting involves
self-exploration, he says. “Acting is not finding what the character
is feeling but finding what you the performer are feeling, and
that is the exploration.”
Another trait
common to the fictional president and the actor who plays him
is that they’re both Catholic. In an episode that focuses on
the death penalty, the president, who’s shown praying the rosary
in his office, asks guidance from a priest he knows. The program
ends with the priest preparing to hear his friend’s confession.
Susan Stewart gave this episode the highest score of 10 in TV
Guide and says, “The timing is perfect for this addictive
new series, which cunningly balances the ruffles and flourishes
of the presidency with the chaotic workings of the White House
staff—and glorifies both. Martin Sheen is a brilliant president;
he’s too good to be true—but that’s a tonic, considering recent
realities.”
Martin sees the
series not so much as a political statement but more as a drama
about a group of human beings thrown together to do a job. The
series focuses on how they struggle to fulfill their responsibilities.
“We’re doing a two-part episode about how my character became
president because, although he likes being president, he really
didn’t want the job. He sort of fell into it. He was an intellectual
from New England. He read Latin. He was a professor—sort of
a Woodrow Wilson type. And his campaign manager becomes his
chief of staff after he wins the election.”
Martin refers
to his character like a lifelong friend, perhaps a compilation
of the many roles he has played over the years.
“If you’ve been
watching the show, you know we’re doing stories about the president
getting ill and having to face his own mortality,” he notes.
“He’s discovered he has multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease
of the central nervous system. More importantly, the show is
revealing how he faces his condition with the members of his
staff, how his relationship is defined with them. For example,
in one episode, we discover the president hasn’t told anyone
about his MS because it’s very difficult for him to reveal this
side of himself and face the big question: What’s beyond us
in this life? So I had to really go into myself to deal with
my own fears about intimacy and death.”
Meeting
Mother Teresa
Martin Sheen hopes
the character he plays on TV is a humble man but questions what
being humble really means. “It’s something I’ve wrestled with
all my life. It’s something I think people really admire in
powerful people, whether it is Gandhi or St. Francis of Assisi
or Mother Teresa.”
He shakes his
head and says, “My son Emilio taught me something about humility
when I was making the film Gandhi over 15 years ago.
I had a week off from filming and I wanted to go to Calcutta
to meet Mother Teresa. Emilio looked at me and said, ‘Dad, you
just want to meet her so you can say you met her.’ And he was
right. So I decided it was more important to stay and spend
some quality time with my boy. I’ve never regretted that.”
Martin met Mother
Teresa “in Rome several years later. A group of us had gone
to help speak out about the Persian Gulf buildup in order to
prevent a bloodbath there. A lot of people don’t know the pope
spent hours and weeks and months calling and trying to bring
about a peaceful solution. The 750,000 children who have since
died in Iraq, because of Saddam Hussein and our government’s
sanctions against his government, is just terrible. So Mother
Teresa showed up at the request of the pope. She was an extraordinary
woman and extremely humble. That was her power. It was Jesus’
power. You know, we walked into the Vatican chapel and there
was the pope kneeling before the altar. Suddenly, we heard someone
weeping, and then we realized it was John Paul sobbing over
the tragedy of what was about to happen in the Middle East.”
Motivation
Behind Activism
Martin Sheen has
become more involved with social and religious causes over the
years. I still remember Martin and actor Ed Asner getting arrested
on a monthly basis at the Federal Building in Los Angeles for
protesting American aid to El Salvador. They firmly believed
there was a connection to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar
Romero and the murder of numerous Catholic clergy and Salvadoran
citizens. Once after Mass I told Martin that I admired his political
activism, but that getting arrested was something I wasn’t quite
ready to do. He shook his head and replied, “Don’t worry about
it, Greg. I wasn’t ready to do it until I turned 40.”
Martin, now age
59, is a virtual dynamo of social activism, and Pax Christi
recently recognized him for his humanitarian work. He’s still
a spokesman for the United Farm Workers throughout the country,
and he can be seen picketing with Franciscan friars outside
the Nevada Nuclear Test Site near Las Vegas.
According to The
Cincinnati Enquirer, one of Martin’s conditions for doing
The West Wing included “time off for the protest rallies
and poverty marches that are important to him.” Indeed, last
November he was among the over 3,000 people who marched on Fort
Benning to protest human-rights abuses in Latin America which
they said are committed by graduates of the Army’s School of
the Americas.
What’s his motivation?
“Life,” he explains. “You can’t live it without seeing the need
to do something. And the underprivileged are always in need.
That’s why the Church constantly strives to be there for them.
St. Francis found his purpose in being poor. It is the antithesis
of what most of us aspire.
“When Jesus was
born, he was visited by shepherds,” he says. “He was a shepherd.
When you travel the world, you discover being a shepherd is
the job nobody wants. Healthy men aren’t shepherds—women, children
and cripples are. People who can’t get any other jobs are shepherds.
So I believe as a middle-class American we will find Christ
mainly in the poor. That’s why I admired Cesar Chavez. He was
dedicated to poor migrant workers in California, trying to improve
their life.”
Several times
when Chavez was fasting and near death, Martin went up to Delano,
California, to be with him. When Chavez died, Martin was one
of the pallbearers. Even though he couldn’t stay for the entire
funeral service, he remembers it vividly: “I actually saw it
on television. There was the casket. L.A.’s Cardinal Roger M.
Mahony did the Mass. When it was finished, they wheeled the
box out of the church and closed the doors. Bang. Cesar was
gone. Then, suddenly, people began to praise Cesar, saying how
great a man he really was and all the things he had done for
them. But the reason they didn’t say it while the coffin was
in the church is they believed he would get a swollen head and
wouldn’t get into heaven.”
He explains the
logic behind this. “A man should do good deeds, but you shouldn’t
hear about it ’til later,” he says. “Nobody should really know
what you’ve done. Or, as Jesus says, ‘Your right hand shouldn’t
know what the left hand is doing.’ After a man’s gone, then
you should hear about his good deeds.”
Something
Sacred
The Christmas
episode of The West Wing dealt with this theme. Toby
Ziegler, director of communications at the White House (played
by Richard Schiff), learns that a homeless man died while wearing
a coat that Toby had donated to charity. Toby discovers that
the man was a Korean War hero and uses the president’s name,
without permission, to arrange a funeral ceremony at Arlington
National Cemetery. The president learns what Toby has done,
asks for an explanation and is moved when he’s told the details.
Mrs. Landingham, the president’s assistant (played by Katherine
Joosten), reveals that her two sons died in Vietnam. She accompanies
Toby to the cemetery.
Martin explains
why he loves this episode: “When that episode was originally
written, the president was supposed to go to the cemetery and
attend the ceremony for the homeless vet.” It was changed because
“it took away the power of Mrs. Landingham and Ziegler, who
were deeply affected by the incident: a woman who has lost two
sons and a man who gave this guy clothes to keep warm. Had the
president been there, it would have taken away the poignancy
of the scene. His presence makes everything too big—the Secret
Service, the press. And that’s why I like this show. We try
to play honest moments with real characters.”
Martin Sheen’s
enthusiasm for his profession is quite obvious: He clearly loves
his craft. Perhaps the irony of life is that actors are often
given roles that reflect actual parts of themselves. Behind
all the hype and the makeup, there really is human drama going
on in front of and behind the camera, even in Hollywood.
Greg Heffernan
is a teacher at Marymount High School in Los Angeles, California,
and a free-lance writer. He has traveled to numerous countries.
