When Bradley Whitford read the series finale of The Comeback, he had an immediate sense of how he’d play Jack Stevens, the legendary TV writer who summons Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) to his office under mysterious circumstances. Valerie had been enjoying yet another comeback role on a new sitcom — the big catch being that it was written entirely by AI — and was set to join a press conference announcing the season two pickup. Upon meeting Valerie, Jack tells her in no uncertain terms: She must use this opportunity to stick up for human writers and denounce AI. 

“I just felt like Jack was John Wells,” Whitford says, referring to the seven-time Emmy-winning icon behind everything from ER to The West Wing to The Pitt. “He is a model of equanimity and decency and sanity, with a genuine love for the creative process. He is a friend and someone who I’ve known since I did an episode of ER in 1995. … He can be really intimidating but is a champion of storytelling and the people who do it.”

Taking that approach, Whitford fits the role like a glove. Bringing that inside-out understanding of his industry and its history speaks to his strengths as a veteran working actor who has made a habit of dropping into established and popular shows mid-run and shaking things up. He’s already won Emmys for guest starring on Transparent and, most recently, The Handmaid’s Tale, and now finds himself back in contention for, in addition to HBO’s The Comeback, his fiery turn as The Diplomat’s new first gentleman. 

The Diplomat’s creator, Debora Cahn, cast Whitford as husband to Allison Janney, with whom the actor has been close friends for decades, going back to their days on The West Wing. The Netflix show, which intimately explores the politics of marriage within high-stakes geopolitical dramas, paralleled the dynamic between protagonist Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) and her husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell) with that of newly appointed POTUS Grace Penn (Janney) and her right-hand, Todd (Whitford). When Grace makes the unexpected pick of Hal as her new vp, things get awfully thorny among this quartet.

“We both felt like it wasn’t an obstacle, but a real asset to us playing this complicated married couple,” Whitford says of his familiarity with Janney. “I mean, you turn a camera on and I get to look into Allison’s eyes — and I’m not a good enough actor to erase all the history there.”

Whitford appeared in three of the season’s eight episodes, most memorably in the sixth installment, “Amagansett,” which is set at the Penns’ Long Island residence and focused nearly entirely on the two couples, playing like Cahn’s Diplomat-ified take on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? At one point, Todd cuts his finger while shucking oysters, bleeding all over the shellfish as he implores his guests to try them; he combines unfinished cocktails of others for his own unhappy chug. He’s coming to terms with his second-fiddle position in the marriage — embodied by Whitford in a master class of pent-up insecurity and passive-aggressiveness. 

“There are levels of very intricate comedy happening: emotionally, they’re really complicated; verbally, they’re complicated; intellectually, they’re complicated,” Whitford says. “On top of all the complexity of the humor and the logistics, you’ve got Todd, who’s being impossible and behaving in the worst way possible as far as Grace is concerned. And then at the end, you realize that what is going on underneath it is that he is just trying to protect her. There are these really contradictory things going on in these scenes.”

Whitford learned a great deal from his experience on The Handmaid’s Tale, where he began as a guest star before joining the regular cast, that he could apply coming into another well-oiled machine like this one. “Having gone through it gave me a little security, a little confidence in how to navigate that,” he says. This includes his understanding that his spotlight episode on The Diplomat was make-or-break for his future on the show. 

“I am nervous coming into a show that you love that clearly has a high bar — it is difficult jumping on a moving train, and you don’t want to screw it up,” he says. “But I’ve been around for a while. I know when they bring me on as a guest actor, and give me a shot like the oysters episode — I know it’s an audition. You can sense that they want it to work. It’s nerve-racking.”

Clearly, he passed the audition — as we speak, Whitford is in Italy shooting season four of The Diplomat, and he’s been bumped up to series regular alongside Janney (who first guest-starred back in season two). “It’s a very kind set, which I think is a necessity for getting the best work out of people,” Whitford says. “There’s no screaming. People are welcomed. The hierarchy disappears.” He credits Russell as the leader of the cast, “an incredibly talented, kind and sane human being filtering down to the whole operation.”

What can he tease for what’s to come? “I just spent a couple of days shooting a couple of huge things with Allison, and they’re really phenomenal scenes,” Whitford says. “I know people will be skeptical because I’m talking to a reporter, and I don’t care if it sounds corny, but you just feel very, very lucky to be sitting around this table with these actors and this writing. … It never gets boring because there’s different ways to play it, over and over and over.”

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.