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.