How Mark Duplass and Bradley Whitford Swapped Bodies

The 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards will be given out Sept. 20, so we’re talking to pairs of nominated actors as we look ahead to the ceremony. (Whatever it ends up being.)

Mark Duplass and Bradley Whitford each received supporting actor Emmy nominations for their work in the dramas “The Morning Show” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” respectively. But they don’t see each other as rivals. Instead, they consider themselves to be family, in a way, although it takes some squinting to see the connection.

Jay Duplass, Mark’s older brother, and Amy Landecker played siblings on “Transparent,” and now Landecker is married to Whitford. So the Duplasses consider him “like a brother-in-law of sorts,” Mark said. “I feel like there’s a kinship. If he called me at 3 a.m. and said, ‘Show up with an ax and a thousand dollars,’ I would do it.”

Whitford recently asked for a different sort of favor — help with executive producing “Not Going Quietly,” a documentary about the universal health care activist Ady Barkan. (The now-completed film is still without a distributor). Whitford has close ties with Barkan, who officiated at his wedding, and he wanted to put his friend in good hands. “I know Mark and Jay are people with big hearts,” he said.

A recent joint phone interview, Duplass and Whitford discussed pandemic production, the perils of walk-and-talk scenes and why, in some cases, the show doesn’t actually have to go on. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. (Note: We didn’t ask Whitford about the “West Wing” reunion to promote When We All Vote because it was announced after this interview happened.)

Q: How’s your pandemic going?

MARK DUPLASS: My pandemic is going relatively well. thank you. I live in LA now, but I’m fascinated by New York’s high-density population, and yet you still have low incidence rates. What does that mean?

BRADLEY WHITFORD: My mom was 46 when I was born — she would be like 105 now — and her earliest memory was funerals in 1918. She was 4 during the Spanish flu, and every time she talked about the pandemic, she’d look up at the ceiling and say, “We didn’t expect the second wave.” I was talking to Andy Slavitt, who was Obama’s health care guy, and he said, “Unless you believe in magical thinking, this is going to explode again.” There’s no national plan. Everybody, understandably, wants to get back to school, get back to life, but that’s not the way it works.

Q: Both of your shows stopped shooting during the shutdown. On “The Handmaid’s Tale,” they thought someone might have been exposed and shut down production early.

WHITFORD: Everybody had a moment when they realized how serious this was. This was in the beginning of March, and I was sitting on set and we were laughing because (Elisabeth Moss) had a horrible cold. None of us were taking (the pandemic) seriously. I’m sitting in a makeup chair reading about it on my cellphone for the first time, and it said, “Whatever you do, don’t touch your face.” Of course, while I was reading that, three different people were touching my face.

We’re about to go back to set and we’ve had safety meetings, and I do feel safer. It’s the traveling that is scary. They told us about the quarantine, and I thought, “How did I end up with more house arrest than Roger Stone?” (Laughs.) They want me to go up (and stay) — usually I would just go back and forth. Nobody can come and visit. It’s tricky, but they’re being very safe about it.

DUPLASS: They’re trying to figure out the “Morning Show” situation right now. We shoot in LA, where the incidence rate is much higher, so it’s a totally different beast. I feel like we’re going to look back in a couple of years and be like, “What were we doing, putting people back to work in the middle of the potential rise of the second wave?” I understand that it is relatively safe. But I have this deep gut feeling that we are putting ourselves at risk to increase profitability for a massive corporation, and I’m not sure that it’s totally worth it. The biggest reason to do it is job creation.

WHITFORD: Olympia Dukakis’ husband, Louis Zorich, was an actor’s actor. I’ll never forget, I was telling him a story about being sick when I had to be naked in a play (“Curse of the Starving Class”). I had salmonella poisoning. Louis said, “Why didn’t you let your understudy do it?” And I was like, “The show must go on.” He turned to me and said, “Listen, if there is anything that does not have to go on, it’s the (expletive) show.” DUPLASS: When you mentioned that you had to go onstage naked while you were sick, my first thought was, “Might a person’s genitals appear different when they are sick?” (Laughs.)

Q: Bradley, people tend to associate you with a Sorkin-style verbal torrent. But on “The Handmaid’s Tale,” so much of what you do is sparse dialogue and silences, and now Mark is the one doing walk-and-talks. You’ve swapped places.

DUPLASS: Bradley Whitford and Mark Duplass are in their own version of a 1980s body-swapping movie. That’s what’s happening here! Who’s Fred Savage, and who’s ... who was the one in “Vice Versa” with him? Judge Reinhold! Who’s Judge Reinhold?

Q: Then what happens if one of you wins the Emmy? Who is in whose body?

DUPLASS: That’s a good point. I think whichever one of us wins, the other one is going to have to put another chunk of money into “Not Going Quietly.”

WHITFORD: Exactly. (Laughs)

DUPLASS: Man, it’s been fun being an improvising mumbler inside the Sorkin tradition. I was nervous about that, because it’s so new for me. I don’t know what your experience was, Bradley, but for me, it’s like a math equation. I got to get these words out roughly by the time I get here, pass the paper, then get this chunk out, then take the bite of a hot dog and get into the control room while the Steadicams follow us. But because I am an improviser and a filmmaker, part of my brain is thinking, “Oh (expletive), I’m going to get to Point C, where there’s not enough dialogue, so I’m going to have to add something to make this work.” And I think what I’ve accidentally done is add a little bit of loose nuance into that melodic cadence of Kerry Ehrin’s dialogue. It creates a fresh hybrid.

WHITFORD: I have so many feelings about walk-and-talks! There is a technical obligation that needs to be filled, and the key is to not let that technical obligation suck the Zen out of you so that you’re walking like a llama. Your blood needs to be flying. And everybody would panic when you wouldn’t get it immediately. Directors would come in and try to micromanage the logistics of it — we would say to them, “Don’t panic after two takes.” We got people who were so scared of doing walk-and-talks on “The West Wing” that we would intentionally (expletive) up the first take early. It’s relaxing — it would tell them, “Oh, you can (expletive) up here.”

DUPLASS: That is some deep-level brilliant. Q: Did you have moments on set where you struggled or doubted yourself?

DUPLASS: Particularly as a male actor on set, there’s this intrinsic value in the ability to emote big and make the wet stuff come out of your eyes. If you can do that, everybody will just cheer as if it’s sort of empirically a good thing to do, whether the scene calls for it or not.

WHITFORD: I think about that with Commander Lawrence (his character in “The Handmaid’s Tale”) all the time, because he loses his wife. I consciously didn’t want it to be me, metrosexual Brad in therapy weeping. There had to be a dam on this guy. You’re always tempted to go there, when in fact people do everything they can not to cry.

DUPLASS: I remember reading the script for Chip’s emotional breakdown in the finale, when the weight comes down on me, and thinking, “Oh, man. This is the moment that I have to get right.” I know there are a lot of actors who are more trained than I am and have no concern about their ability to get there, but that’s a concern for me.

You imagine that when it’s time to shoot your big scene, the whole world is going to stop. It’s more like, “The sun’s going down, run out to the middle of the field and make this happen.” The conditions are never ideal. If I taught acting, I would have a class at 3 a.m. Anybody can act after you’ve slept. The key is to do a really big scene when you’re exhausted — after you’ve eaten spaghetti and meatballs at 11:30 p.m. for your lunch, after you’ve shame-eaten a package of Oreos at 2 a.m., after you’ve slept for 45 minutes. Then they knocked on your door and dragged you out and put you on the spot. That’s the class.