He may have left TV behind for films like The Social Network, Moneyball and Steve Jobs, but acclaimed screenwriter Aaron Sorkin isn’t ruling out a return to his most enduring small-screen creation – just so long as a certain actor is involved.


“Rob Lowe said he’d do another episode of the West Wing if I wrote it,” Sorkin told RadioTimes.com. “If I ever got an idea for another episode of the West Wing, I would do it – but only if Rob Lowe promised to be in it.”

He added: “Touché, Rob Lowe.”

Lowe made the comments on a Reddit Ask Me Anything last month, and while we’re not sure how serious Sorkin actually is (or whether he’s just playing a weird game of scriptwriting chicken with Rob Lowe), it’s certainly kept our hopes burning for a West Wing reunion. That said, it doesn’t sound like Sorkin is desperate for a return to TV writing.

Rob Lowe in The West Wing

“I love serious television – my only problem with it is time,” Sorkin told us. “With a movie, if things aren’t going well, if you’re stuck, if you have writer’s block, if you’re not writing well – you can call the studio, you can call the producer, you can call whoever is waiting for it, and say ‘things aren’t going well. I know I said I was going to deliver a first draft in June, it’ll probably be more like August.’

“With television, because of air dates, you have rock-solid deadlines, that you can’t move. And so you have to write even when you’re not writing well, which is a very unpleasant place to be. Even worse, you have to point a camera at it and show it to an audience.”

For now it seems like he’s sticking with the movies – and after the runaway success of his Facebook biopic The Social Network, Sorkin’s returning to the tech world for his latest script Steve Jobs (which is released in cinemas today).

“Not being technologically sophisticated at all, it was unlikely that either story – the Social Network or Steve Jobs – was going to be about technology,” Sorkin said. “It was going to be about humans, and relationships, and tensions and obstacles.”

“At the centre of both movies are tech titans – and that’s really more of a coincidence than anything else,” he went on. “But [Steve Jobs director] Danny Boyle disagrees with me that it’s a coincidence – he thinks I’m drawn to it for different reasons, he thinks that Steve Jobs is the second of a trilogy that I’m bound to write. I don’t know what the third of those would be.”

Perhaps something about a handsome lawyer doing some computing for the White House? Because we might know just the actor to call…


Steve Jobs is in cinemas now