The West Wing shows us the great dramatic career Matthew Perry never had

Matthew Perry was so much more than Chandler Bing, argues Louis Chilton, who recalls the late actor’s extraordinary Emmy-nominated guest role in which his character unpicks a scandal that brings down the vice president. His show-stealing turn on the political drama gave a glimpse of what might have been...

Look who’s Sorkin: Matthew Perry as Joe Quincy in ‘The West Wing’ (Warner Bros)

Few stars have been tethered quite so tightly to a role as Matthew Perry was to Chandler Bing. The actor, who died shockingly last week at the age of 54, never managed to slip out of his Friends character’s shadow; most would argue he never needed to. As the sitcom’s resident joker, Perry doled out sarcastic quips with an almost mechanical acuity. He was the witty one. The reliable one. The one who could take any half-baked jibe and really make it sing. Look past the gags, though, and there was another Perry: a shrewd dramatic performer with unplumbed depths.

Perhaps the closest viewers ever came to gleaning this side of Perry was in The West Wing. He made a guest appearance in season four of Aaron Sorkin’s award-hoarding political drama, playing ace lawyer Joe Quincy, new appointee to the position of associate White House council. He reprised the role the following season, starring in a total of three episodes for which he received two Emmy nods. Perry’s time on the show was ultimately short-lived – he was still committing much of his schedule to Friends – but in the wake of his death, it’s hard not to lament the career he could have had.

In theory, Perry was the perfect mouthpiece for Sorkin’s writing. The A Few Good Men scribe – whose later projects include The Newsroom, The Social Network and The Trial of the Chicago 7 – is renowned for his heightened, verbose back-and-forth dialogue. Surely TV’s foremost sitcom quipster would devour such repartee. Indeed, Perry did revel in the cocksure eloquence of a Sorkin witticism. But he also found layers to his persona. He toned down the sarcastic delivery – so often on Friends, blown into a hammy crescendo – and played Joe with a kind of unassuming sharpness.

Perry’s best appearance in The West Wing arrived in the season four episode “Life on Mars”, in which his character joins the White House. It’s his first day on the job, and it’s a violent plunge into the deep end. After multiple stories leak to a press gossip columnist, he unpicks a scandal that brings down the vice president (John Hoynes, played by Tim Matheson). Intelligent, driven, and eminently competent, Joe Quincy is the archetypal Sorkin character. But atop the cliche, we have the specific: a sort of deer-in-headlights reticence; the crushing weight of the knowledge he is destroying a man’s career.

It wasn’t just the dialogue that Perry made his own. In one memorable scene, Joe meets with press secretary CJ Cregg (Allison Janney) to confirm his suspicions about the leaks. She telephones the journalist they suspect is the conduit; as the hack starts yammering away down the line, Quincy stands in front of her, laying out the evidence in a series of phone records and news cuttings. He says nothing: the scene is played out in a sequence of loaded glances. It’s compelling and wholly understated in a way Perry seldom was afforded the chance to be.

The West Wing was ultimately little more than a stopover for Perry. He would work with Sorkin at greater length after Friends ended, as one of the leads of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Unfortunately for both, Studio 60 enjoyed little of The West Wing’s creative, critical or commercial success; the peek-behind-the-curtain of a network variety show went down as one of the medium’s great flops, and was cancelled after just one season. Perry’s big post-Friends break seemed to have passed him by.

The one with the White House: Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) and Joe Quincy (Perry) in ‘The West Wing’ (Warner Bros)

Of course, that’s not to say that Perry’s dramatic prospects fizzled out completely. His later appearances in The Good Wife rank among his best work, and in 2016 he branched out into playwriting with the West End drama The End of Longing, in which he starred as a sarcastic, alcoholic photographer. On top of this, he was pouring time, money and effort into his addiction activism, while dealing with his own (sometimes life-threatening) drug problem. The fact Perry never became a heavyweight dramatic actor is understandable but as his West Wing appearances show, it’s still a crying shame.

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