Acting out a dream
Mary McCormack ’91 finds joy in her craft, focuses on public service in new book on ‘The West Wing’
Story by Sonya Storch Adams
Portraits by Catie Laffoon/Courtesy of Mary McCormack ’91
“I think there’s something almost like a tonic about watching it in the times we’re living in now,” says Mary McCormack ’91 of The West Wing, the seven-season hit television show—now streaming on Max—on which she played Deputy National Security Adviser Kate Harper.
Nominated for 95 Emmys and the recipient of 26, the hourlong drama centered on the fictional White House administration of Josiah “Jed” Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen. Others in the star-studded cast included Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford, Richard Schiff, Dulé Hill, Janel Moloney, Josh Malina, and Melissa Fitzgerald.
A key theme of the series, which ran from 1999–2006 on NBC and marked its 25th anniversary last year, was public service, with characters devoted to the country and to the public good. According to McCormack, series creator Aaron Sorkin once called The West Wing a “love letter to public service.”
With that in mind, McCormack and Fitzgerald teamed up to write What’s Next: A Backstage Pass to The West Wing, Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service. McCormack says readers, especially “Wing-nuts”—what the cast admiringly calls superfans of the show—will enjoy the book, which is chock full of behind-the-scenes details intertwined with the public service priorities of the actors. The pages about McCormack’s charitable focus, for instance, explore her devotion to Justice for Vets (a division of All Rise), which benefits veterans; The Trevor Project, which supports LGBTQ+ youth; and Moms Demand Action, which works to protect people from gun violence.
McCormack says that the “unusually close” nature of The West Wing cast members helps them support one another’s nonprofit work. “We’re on a text chain that lights up all day long,” she says. “We’re a really, really tight group of friends . . . and I think that service helps keep us close. We do quite a bit of it separately and quite a bit together. If someone sends out the bat signal, we all answer.”
McCormack and Fitzgerald began the book project in 2020, around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 100 interviews were conducted by Zoom, which McCormack says worked well.
“We could reach everyone; we were so spread out,” she says. “We talked to crew, we talked to background actors, writers, producers, everyone involved in the show, so Zoom actually was a great way of doing it. It was nice to connect with everyone and to hear people’s stories—a lot we knew, but tons we didn’t know—and to get people’s different points of view.”
She notes that What’s Next—with a title inspired by an oft-repeated phrase from the show—is different from other “fan books” because it was written by cast members. “We had the support of and the access to creator Aaron Sorkin, producer John Wells, and all the writers. We also got to talk to the head casting director, and he gave us access to his casting binders, which is incredible.
“It’s also a big book,” she continues. At 588 pages, “it was three times the length we thought it was going to be; there’s so much more we could have published and shared. I guess there’s always the chance of a sequel!”
McCormack, along with Sheen and Fitzgerald, visited the real White House in August 2024 to deliver the book to President Joe Biden and wife Jill. “That was amazing. I mean, who gets to do that?” McCormack recalls. “And there we were, chatting a little bit, and Martin Sheen was with us. President Biden said to him, ‘You didn’t tell me how hard this job was,’ and Martin was like, ‘I didn’t really know. I was just a TV president.’
“They were really cute together,” she continues. “And then [Biden] said, ‘Why don’t you walk me out to Marine One?’ That’s not a sentence you hear every day. We did, and I couldn’t believe it. I kept thinking I had to wake up. This has to be a dream.”
McCormack always had a dream of being an actor. Growing up in Plainfield, New Jersey, she says, she loved theater and performing. Every year on her birthday, her parents took her to New York City to see a Broadway musical. “I couldn’t believe that was a job, these adults on stage dancing and singing and having a ball! I couldn’t believe that was an actual job adults could have,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘I’ll do that.’ Spoken with the built-in bravado of an 8-year-old!”
When it came time for college, she says, she applied to five schools and almost enrolled in a five-year joint program in classical singing at Tufts University and the New England Conservatory. But she thought that while she loved classical singing, she wasn’t sure that she wanted five more years and a career in it.
Instead, she decided to follow her older sister, Bridget McCormack ’88, who already was at Trinity. “The pull of Bridget . . . we’re really close, and it seemed very easy and right. I had been there [on campus] a lot, and I loved it.”
The sisters overlapped for one year—when Mary was a first-year and Bridget was a senior—and lived in the same residence hall, High Rise, but on different floors. “It was like we were living in New Jersey again,” McCormack recalls. “I would go up and steal clothes from her, and she’d get mad when I wouldn’t return them. It was fabulous!”
Bridget McCormack, a former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and now CEO and president of the American Arbitration Association-International Centre for Dispute Resolution, has similar recollections. “It was great,” she says. “I was a senior and felt like I could make her transition easier and less stressful. I’m not sure she really needed me for that, but I liked thinking she did. I loved having her around.
“Mary is one of a kind,” she adds. “She is exquisitely talented in her field—not just as an actor and a singer but also as a creator and an editor and a writer. She can see the way to make everything beautiful, and she always has a gorgeous way of explaining or describing people, emotions, and memories. And she is hilarious—the funniest person I know.”
McCormack says her big sister kept a protective eye on her. “She’s always looked after me growing up, and she continued doing it at Trinity. I auditioned for the Pipes [a cappella group], and she was like, ‘That’s good, that’s the one to do.’ I had all the inside scoop.”
In addition to the Pipes, McCormack sang in the Concert Choir and had supporting roles in all the spring musicals. She recalls with particular fondness each fall’s musical revue, where everyone had a solo. “Trinity is a small school, so that was a small group of people, and we were all really close. I love Gerry Moshell [professor of music, emeritus], and I’m still in touch with him.”
In fact, Moshell arranged and played “Married” from Cabaret at her 2003 London wedding to director and Emmy-nominated producer Michael Morris. Moshell recalls McCormack as one who “dove right away into a daunting array” of performance activities.
McCormack created her own interdisciplinary major in comparative arts. “I loved studio arts, and I loved creative writing and English, and I couldn’t decide. I had taken so many courses in each,” she says.
The major was a good fit for her, according to Moshell, who notes that it allowed “the kind of not-entirely-structured structure in which particularly smart and imaginative Trinity students, like Mary, could assert creativity and thrive.” He adds, “This holistic approach was surely contributory to Mary’s flourishing, intelligently pursued career in TV, movies, and the theater.”
The positive experiences that the McCormack sisters had at Trinity directly affected their younger brother, Will McCormack ’96, a director, writer, and producer, as well as the recipient of a 2021 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film for If Anything Happens I Love You. “It never occurred to me to go anywhere else,” he says. “Trinity was always my first choice. I idolized my older sisters. So when they went to Trinity, I knew I had to.”
He describes McCormack as “a force of nature. [She’s] strong. A real leader with a strong moral compass. An incredible mother and wonderful sister.” He adds, “Mary is such a gifted artist. and at Trinity, she was really able to carve out and build her sense of self. She really grew into herself there.”
For McCormack, a liberal arts background laid the groundwork for her next steps. “I feel very lucky that I took a wide range of classes at Trinity because I think that’s the best preparation for an actor,” she says. “It makes you a deeper, more interesting person, which makes for a better artist.”
After McCormack graduated, her older sister, already in an apartment in New York City, invited McCormack to join her. McCormack signed up for a two-year program at the William Esper Studio, a top acting school in Manhattan, and waited tables to pay the bills. She also volunteered two days a week at a small talent agency, where she learned a different side of show business. “You can see who they represented and why, whose calls got returned, what worked for actors and what didn’t,” she says. “I felt like I had pulled the curtain up.”
The agency eventually took her on as a client, and while she landed some small roles, she still had to keep waiting tables . . . until, that is, she landed a big one.
“There was a day when I could stop doing all of that. I auditioned for a TV show, and I got it. It was called Murder One, a TV show for ABC produced by Steven Bochco, one of the great producers of all time. He made Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, NYPD Blue, and so many more.”
“The day I got that job, I had three restaurant jobs—a brunch shift, a dinner shift, and a cocktail thing at night. I did all three, and then I never did it again. . . . It changed my whole life. I went from being hungry to being a working actor in Los Angeles.”
McCormack says many of her roles—nearly 100 in television and film and on the stage—are memorable for different reasons. She cites playing Alison Stern in Private Parts, the Howard Stern biopic, as “a massive turning point” for her because of the size of the movie and the size of the role, adding that she and Stern remain good friends.
She also played “saucy” U.S. Marshal Mary Shannon on USA Network’s In Plain Sight, which ran from 2008 to 2012, and mom-of-eight-boys Peggy Cleary on the short-lived but highly lauded 2018 ABC comedy series The Kids Are Alright, about which McCormack says, “I loved it. I would have done that part forever.”
McCormack also has made her mark on the Broadway stage, including a Tony-nominated run as “over-the-top German flight attendant” Gretchen in Boeing-Boeing. “That was exciting. Because I grew up in New Jersey and seeing plays, for me to be on Broadway is really fun.”
And then, of course, there’s The West Wing. Of the cast, she says, “That’s a group of people who are like real, actual family. Martin Sheen is like a second father. I feel very fortunate for The West Wing to have happened in my life.”
What’s next
McCormack soon will be on the big screen again, this time as Dakota Fanning’s mother in the upcoming horror movie Vicious. “It’s seriously creepy,” she says of the film, which is due out in 2025. She also recently debuted in the Netflix series Heels, a critically acclaimed drama about two brothers who work for a family wrestling company.
As she eyes the future, McCormack says looks forward to doing more theater now that her three daughters—ages 20, 17, and 13—are getting older. “Theater is a six-month commitment, so you really can’t do it unless you pick up and move the whole family,” she says. “So, it was sort of temporarily off the table. But soon, I’ll be back to that chapter.”
What does she enjoy most about being an actor? “You’re a storyteller. I like playing make-believe,” she says. “But I also love that every day is different, that I shoot all over the world, that no two days are the same. It’s always new actors, new crews, new locations, new stories . . . and that suits me, that kind of adventure. I love it.”
West Wing Photo: Photo 12/Alamy Stock
White House Photo: UPI/Alamy Stock Photo
Family Photo: Courtesy of Mary McCormack ’91
