Richard Schiff

Watch Toby Ziegler while somebody else is talking. Schiff speaks quietly and without hurry in a series where everyone else is walking fast and finishing each other's sentences, and he gives every impression of having lost the argument in his own head some time ago and of deciding whether to have it aloud anyway. He usually does. In our review of The West Wing (1999) we called him the abrasive presence in the ensemble, the one who stops agreement from seeming automatic, and that is the job he does nearly everywhere: the man at the table who has not been won over and does not intend to pretend.

He started as a director, not an actor, which may explain the watching. He began in New York theatre staging off-Broadway plays, including Antigone in 1983 with Angela Bassett, and switched to acting in the mid-1980s. Small parts followed, among them Mark Swarr in Se7en (1995), and then Steven Spielberg, who had seen him in High Incident, cast him as Eddie Carr in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). Our review did not single him out, which is fair; it is a film that treats its people as bait, and he is one of them. Two years later Aaron Sorkin gave him Toby, and he stayed until 2006.

Sorkin is the writer who has got the most out of him, because Sorkin writes fast and Schiff plays slow. Against Bradley Whitford's Josh Lyman, all useful, faintly exhausting quickness, Toby is the one who slows things down, and the programme needs him for that. The dry, deadpan humour directors keep noticing is his best tool: he can let a line fall as a joke without moving his face, so you are never sure he meant it. He moved us more than anyone else in the series, and it was because he never asked to. The scenes in which Toby is plainly losing, knows it, and keeps arguing on principle were the ones we were still thinking about a week later.

The limit is that the parts arrive in one shape: serious, clever, in charge of something, supporting, in an ensemble. In Ray (2004) he plays Jerry Wexler, having shaved his beard for it, and does it well; but the film, as we said, tells Ray Charles's story one contract, one hit and one relapse at a time, which leaves a supporting player about a scene per contract. He has said publicly that he could not stand what the final season of The West Wing did with Toby. We will not describe it; we will say it sat oddly on a character he had spent six years making consistent.

From 2017 to 2024 he had a lead at last, as Dr Aaron Glassman in The Good Doctor, a mentor part, so television has noticed he can carry more than a corner of the frame. We would like a film to notice too.