The Diplomat season three reunites The West Wing’s Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford

When actors sit down for interviews during the promotional trail for a new project, there are often rules that come with the exchange.

Personal questions are usually a no-no, increasingly, anything to do with politics, and there’s often a polite reminder to keep it “focused” on the release at hand, because the studio doesn’t want you spending all their time rehashing over that small role the talent once had in Love Actually or The Devil Wears Prada.

For the upcoming season of The Diplomat, the powers-that-be knew any request to not dwell on the past was fighting the tide. It can’t be done.

That’s what happens when you reunite two of the biggest stars from the biggest political drama of the past quarter-century in a similar milieu: Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford.

They were, of course, CJ Cregg and Joshua Lyman of The West Wing, and now they’re back on screen together as President Grace Penn and First Gentleman Todd Penn of The Diplomat.

Janney joined The Diplomat, led by Keri Russell and created by Debora Cahn, in season two as Penn, the then vice president who finds herself thrust into the top job. There had been references to an off-screen husband, and when it came time to cast him, Cahn thought of Whitford.

Cahn is also an alum of The West Wing, serving in its writing room from seasons four to seven, along with The Diplomat producers Alex Graves and Eli Attie. There’s a whole gang, but what gets fans excited are the faces they can see.

Janney recalled the moment she found out Cahn was thinking about bringing Whitford on board. “She texted me and she just said ‘Brad Whitford’ and I knew exactly what she meant,” Janney told The Nightly.

“I just texted ‘of course’. It was such a great choice and I loved that she made it knowing we had this West Wing history together, but knowing that she trusted as actors to bring something completely different to the table with these two characters.

“People will see that. They might come because they want to see CJ and Josh, but they’ll be happy to fall in love with Grace and Todd.”

It is a different dynamic. Whereas CJ and Josh were like brother and sister, verbally sparring over everything ranging from important policy to petty gripes, Grace and Todd have the gravity and history of a long-married couple. She’s the most powerful woman in the world and he refers to himself as an “increasingly insignificant house husband”.

On the surface, The Diplomat’s title refers to Russell’s lead character of Kate Wyler, who at the start of the series is appointed as the US’s ambassador to the UK. But it’s also about the diplomacy required in a marriage.

“That’s what being in a long-term relationship is like,” Russell said. “It’s full of compromise and it goes back and forth. It’s the constant negotiations for power or who gets what.”

Those aspects of the show, the interpersonal texture between Kate and her even more ambitious husband Hal (Rufus Sewell), is ramped up in the third season, and now with the added dynamics of Grace and Todd’s uneasy marriage.

“(The Diplomat) was a show that I was jealous of,” Whitford said. “There are a couple of shows that you get jealous of, some of them, I mean, obviously there’s no place for me in Fleabag but I was jealous of this show.”

While the two are guest stars this season (they were both still shooting other projects, he on The Handmaid’s Tale and Janney on Palm Royale, and Whitford only appears in one scene until episode six), they have been upped to regulars for a fourth season that has already been commissioned.

Signing on was a no-brainer, especially when he knew he would be paired with Janney.

“Allison is someone you trust that the scene’s going to work, and that it’s going to be fun, and that you’re going to find some weirdness in it,” Whitford said.

The familiar refrain, apart from jumping in with a whole gang of West Wing alums, is being part of a political drama when the real world seems wildly deviated from norms.

The West Wing was halfway into its second season when George W. Bush was elected president, and it returned for its third a month after the attack on the Twin Towers.

The series had one non-canonical episode, “Isaac and Ishmael”, that addressed the themes of terrorism, but otherwise existed in its own pocket universe.

“I remember West Wing in the wake of 9/11, you wondered how a show, not of that world, could exist, and we were dealing with the Bush Administration,” Whitford recalled. “(Now), George Bush looks like Joan Baez painting his toe in his bathtub.

“This (moment in time) is a whole different level of dysfunction and madness.

“I don’t want to overstate the power of storytelling because if it was as powerful as I wanted it to be, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But I do think it’s important to double-down, even if it’s in fiction, on the stakes of public service, on the stakes and complexities of building a safer world.

“So, (a fictional political drama and realpolitik) inevitably bounce off each other.”

Janney wondered how Cahn and the writers will respond to the political situation in the US in season four, which she hasn’t seen any scripts from yet. The third season, Cahn said, was written two years ago.

Janney was glad that Cahn was able to write a scene in which a woman is sworn in as the president of the United States.

“(That’s) something that we have not been able to do yet as a country,” the actor said. “I, as Grace, was sworn in not too long after the results of the last election. So, it was a very bittersweet moment on set for everyone to watch that.

“There’s an honour and responsibility I feel in projecting this, or showing it on TV, so that life might imitate art one day, just normalising seeing a female in the highest position of power in the United States.”

It’s not just wish-fulfilment for the big one. When it debuted in 2023, the series wanted to reflect the real people who work in the diplomatic corps. Perhaps not the show’s Hollywood-ified dramatics of conspiracies and false flag schemes, but the operations of international diplomacy.

“The people we’re representing are, for the most part, civil servants,” Russell said. “Public servants who are really high-functioning, who could be doing many other things with their life for a lot more money, and are choosing to work in service to make people’s lives matter.

“And they do it under any administration.”

There’s no getting around the fact that under the current administration, those positions have come under sustained attack as diplomatic and humanitarian programs are dismantled. The shuttering of USAID was criticised by former presidents Barack Obama and Bush, a Democrat and a Republican.

For Cahn, there’s even more urgency now for a piece of drama such as The Diplomat to represent the work of diplomatic staff. “Tens of thousands of people who work for our government have just been fired, and years of experience have been cast aside as if they were useless, and they’re not,” she said.

“We are lucky to have this opportunity to talk about people who are doing that kind of work. We are huge admirers of theirs.

“It’s scary to have learnt even more about this world, and so we have a clearer picture of what the cost is when you tear down institutions that have been devoted to helping people in tough situations. That cost is unbelievable. It makes my stomach hurt to think of it.”

Russell said she and the team have met many real-world counterparts, countless ambassadors who are “doing incredible things in difficult situations and difficult places”.

She added, “They’re a true marvel, and I feel lucky we get to tell a few of their stories”.

The Diplomat season three is streaming on Netflix