Malina: I do enjoy a good practical joke. My first season, I really felt like I was a guest in someone else's house and I was raised by my parents to be a good guest. But by my second season I felt like I owned the place and so I really started firing salvos at everybody; doing anything I could to create chaos and tension.
"There is a fine line between being the life of the party and being unemployable."
Whitford: The problem with Josh is he has no sense of proportion. It's like you shake hands with a hand buzzer, then he will pick your daughter up from school and not tell you. The sickest things were the small shit he used to do. I was always reading books on the set and he would tear the last few pages out of them! Also, at one point I was going through a really difficult time and I had this very sweet assistant who would write little supportive aphorisms on post-its and leave them in my dressing room, like: "I have the time and space to do everything that I need to do." Little things like that. And Josh, who would apparently always go into my dressing room, would take those down and put things like, "There is no happiness. The reward is death." "Will I ever work again?"
Malina: There is a fine line between being the life of the party and being unemployable. I felt safe enough with my fellow actors that I knew if I left a small fish hidden somewhere in Allison Janney's trailer, that she wouldn't get me fired for it. Although there was one time Allison was wearing a wig and we had a scene on Air Force One where in every take she had to answer the phone. I coated the earpiece with a thick, viscous combination of, I think, sunscreen and vaseline. I didn't realise she was wearing a wig at the time and when she answered the phone she got an earful of this stuff but it also got all over the wig! That was the one time where I thought, "Oh, I've gone too far. I'm actually about to get fired." Because we had to shut down production while they figured out what the hell to do with her hair on the next take.
Whitford: This show would eat directors. I mean eat them. You'd find them crying behind the set. One Friday we were going to shoot until four in the morning, so Josh gets the director's keys from the teamster and fills the director's car with computers and stuff taken from the set. Then we wrap at four and this poor, exhausted guy heads out and as we're leaving the studio, we see the Burbank police are there and they've arrested the director! And that's just funny for Josh, that's Josh having fun.
Malina: Occasionally I'll hear a story and I'll think, "Wait, did I do that? Did I go that far...?" I may have.
Whitford: A couple of years ago, I got calls from agents, managers, lawyers – everybody's calling me like, "Are you alright? Are you alright?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I'm fine." Josh had started a Twitter account in my name and had me on this drunken binge, you know, wondering if I really am attracted to women. It was really intense!
Malina: There was the infamous Valentine's Day bouquet – but I actually have to give Janel Moloney credit for that one.
Moloney: Brad Whitford's one of those really touchy guys: huggy, touchy, always massaging someone. Jimmy Smits is not that guy at all but he's really nice so one day I watched him standing there being cool and just tolerating Brad rubbing his back. It was near Valentine's Day and I just thought, "wouldn't it be funny if we sent some flowers to him… from Brad." We even put a note with it as Josh Malina had been in Brad's trailer and stolen some of his personalised mail cards. The only thing was Jimmy didn't realise that it was a joke. He was touched! Which is, like, the worst outcome ever! He walked in and he was like, "That's so nice, Brad, that's so nice. Thank you so much." And he gave him a big hug. I thought someone would tell him it was a joke, but I guess nobody did. Then like a year later he found out and he was really mad.
"Josh had started a Twitter account in my name and had me on this drunken binge, you know, wondering if I really am attracted to women. It was really intense!"
Smits: Yeah, Josh was the head of the prankster brigade. I never really got him back for that, unfortunately. I almost got him back on the Ellen show, though. They were doing a retrospective and they brought this big cake out. I almost got Richard Schiff to grab the cake and whack Malina in the face with it on camera – I was going to give him five grand! He was almost going to go for it, but Josh got wind of it and he started running. I still owe him! He avoids me every chance he gets.
Whitford: I got him back for the roses. I attempted to have him edited into the Screen Actors Guild 'In Memoriam' reel. I had a check written for $3000 but the editor chickened out. That would have been great: just fucking kill him! But when I was doing the script for the second episode I wrote for the show, all I thought about going into it was, "I'm going to have Josh Malina say over and over again on national television that he's a terrible actor." And it's in there! C.J. brings him over and says, "Listen, I don't know if you know this, but the President's son-in-law is banging the nanny." And Josh goes, "Why did you tell me that?" And she goes, "Because you have to deal with the press." He goes, "Exactly! How am I supposed to hide that? I'm a terrible actor! I'm a terrible actor, I don't like to pretend, I'm no good at it!" Watch, it's there! So that's how I got him back.
Malina: I met my match in our director, Alex Graves. We had a certain mano-a-mano going all the way back to Sports Night. Whereas with Brad I would try to achieve a greater level of sophistication in my pranking, with Alex it was just down and dirty. Now he's someone who has no barometer for proportional response. I did something mild to him on Sports Night and then one day I was walking up the stairwell to get to the stage and three people attacked me with fire extinguishers! I've tried to explain to him the difference between the art of the prank and flat-out vandalism but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
He's a big music fan, so one day I took his iPod and I changed the controls to Mandarin Chinese, which is actually fantastic because in order to change the settings back to English you have to know enough Mandarin Chinese to get to the settings! I also erased all 8,000 songs, essentially rendering the device useless. Instead of him plotting an elaborate revenge, I rounded a corner at work and he just punched me in the groin! I was doubled over and gasping, "Alex, can you raise your game? This is just assault! Assault and battery! Look at what I did – it took time, I had to infiltrate, I had to steal your thing, I had to come up with setting it... You're just attacking me!"