It’s been 15 years since Aaron Sorkin walked away from his hit political drama “The West Wing,” and while the show was still popular after his departure, it was never the same.

“I’ll never forget that I got a call from Aaron and [executive producer Thomas Schlamme] at the end of the fourth season,” Tim Matheson, who played Vice President Hoynes, recently told Page Six. “He said, ‘Listen, I got some news for you. Tommy and I are leaving the show after this season and so are you.'”

At the end of the fourth season, it was revealed that Matheson’s character had leaked confidential information to his mistress, forcing him to resign. Matheson told us the storyline was written that way so that when liberal President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) steps away from the presidency in the season finale, his replacement would be a Republican — adding drama to the show.

“It was really heartbreaking because I loved being on that show,” the 70-year-old actor said. “But I also felt that they were the heart of the show. I liked the show after they left. I went back and did a few episodes here and there, but it wasn’t the same.”

At the time, Sorkin released a statement saying, “I had the best job in show business for four years and I’ll never forget that.”

He never specified why he was leaving and to this day he has never seen the final three seasons of the show. “It felt like I was watching someone make out with my wife,” Sorkin said during a reunion panel in 2016.

Matheson said he thought one of the reasons the pair walked away was because they refused to compromise.

“I can remember shooting a scene in the Oval Office and it was like four or five of us in the scene. I don’t know if they dropped the piece of coverage or something, but we went back and shot a close-up a day later or a week later and nobody does that,” Matheson explained. “But they didn’t compromise and they just had their way of doing things and it cost a lot of money. So I think after four years, [the network] decided we could do this for a lot cheaper if we didn’t go to these extremes and we compromise a bit.”

Matheson says working on “The West Wing” and with Oscar-winning Sorkin was a privilege in his lengthy career, which began in the 1960s.

“You’d sit down and do a read-through the week an episode started and you’d go, ‘How did he do it?’ Because the last episode you did you thought, ‘This is brilliant. This is as good as it gets.’ It was like check and raise. He’d raise the bar for the next episode, it was even better.”

Making us nostalgic for President Bartlet has us wondering, “What’s next?”