Creation and Development
According to series creator Aaron Sorkin, Schiff was cast in the role of Toby Ziegler over many other actors auditioning, including Eugene Levy. Schiff created his own backstory for the character by wearing his own wedding ring, something Sorkin and fellow executive producer Thomas Schlamme did not notice until the show's eighth episode, while planning to give Toby an ex-wife. "I had always imagined that his first wife had died, which accounts for his sadness, and why someone would devote himself to public service and be so singular about it," says Schiff. "But then, Aaron and Tommy threw that right out the window." Richard Schiff claimed during an interview on Britain's BBC News 24 that the character had been heavily based upon the Scots-American political advisor Patrick Cohen who was prominent in Bill Clinton's 1992 Presidential campaign and is viewed as one of the key architects of New Labour.
Read more about this topic: Toby Ziegler
Famous quotes containing the words creation and/or development:
“We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality.
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)