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OFF STAGE

The 36-year-old actor may now be known to millions of television viewers as the irascible producer Don Keefer on HBO’s The Newsroom. But it was his work on the stage that “introduced” him to Newsroom creator Aaron Sorkin.

Sadoski started his career as the understudy to a then-unknown Mark Ruffalo in Kenneth Lonergan’s 1998 off-Broadway breakout success, This Is Our Youth.

But his big break came 10 years later when he was cast in LaBute’s off-Broadway play, reasons to be pretty, playing a clueless guy who commits the unpardonable sin of referring to the face of his girlfriend - played by Newsroom co-star Alison Pill - as “regular.” In 2009, the play (sans Pill) moved to Broadway, where Sadoski picked up a Tony nod and unknowingly caught Sorkin’s attention.

He continued to work on the stage, with notable roles in the Broadway revival of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves and Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities in 2011.

Like so many New York stage actors, Sadoski’s introduction to TV acting came courtesy of Dick Wolf. “I hit the trifecta on Law & Order: I did the original recipe, extra crispy and the Colonel’s special,” he joked. “My longest arc was a drug dealer on As the World Turns for seven episodes.”

That changed in 2011 when he was cast in Sorkin’s return to episodic television, The Newsroom. Sadoski talks about moving from theatre to television, working with Sorkin, and making his L.A.-stage debut in Michael Golamco’s Build.

How did you become part of The Newsroom?

Aaron Sorkin had seen reasons to be pretty, and at the time I was doing The House of Blue Leaves on Broadway, which Scott Rudin was producing. Actually, both Alison Pill and I both were doing it. I got a call: “Aaron would like you to read for this part.”

Pill came in and was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m auditioning for the new Aaron Sorkin series!” And I was like, “Oh my God, I just got the same call!”

I went in and read; it went well. A couple of weeks went by, and it was the opening night of House of Blue Leaves, and my agent and manager grabbed me, pulled me into a corner and told me: “We got the call, you’re going to get the offer on Sorkin’s new series.”

You and Alison Pill had been in two plays together, did that make the set less intimidating?

The thing that was so exciting about working on The Newsroom is that we’re all theatre rats. The first day of rehearsal in L.A., Aaron got up and said, “You’re going to look around this room and notice we are front-loaded with an extraordinary amount of Broadway theatre talent. That is not by accident.”

Who is responsible for all the inside theatre jokes? Sarah Bernhardt? Annie Oakley? Momma Rose?

Those are all Aaron. You have to remember he was a musical theatre major. There’s one in every episode, and for whoever gets it, it’s like getting the ring in the pudding.

What’s the difference between working with a playwright in theatre and the writers on an HBO show?

In theatre, we get to spend so much more time working very specifically and very subtly on a framework; we get to really manicure our frame. And once that very manicured frame is put together, you have a great deal of space inside it to work as an actor from show to show.

With The Newsroom, we don’t have as much time to put that framework together as a collaborative group.There have been reports that communication between Sorkin and his writing staff was less than ideal. As an actor, do you have as much freedom to interact with Sorkin as you would with a playwright?

My thinking is this: You don’t tell Ansel Adams how to shoot Yosemite. I had a line in the pilot that he changed, and it was a little bit sticky for me. I got the changes and I was like, “Hmm, I like the old one better. But I have no idea how to say this to Aaron Sorkin.” So, in a fit of foolish bombast, I sat down and wrote this email to him and said, “Hey man, I really love the changes, but there’s one sentence that you changed, a word and a tense, that now tells a different story and I think if we use this repetition that you had in their initially, it sharpens the edge. What do you think?”

And he wrote right back to me 10 minutes later: “Great idea. Love it. Keep it. Go.” And I never did it again.

Why follow your big break with an intimate new play at the Geffen?

Theatre is all I really know, and it’s all I really trust as an artist at this point. It’s my artistic home, and it’s where I’m comfortable. -I want to be in the theatre world out here because, frankly, I can’t live without it. I can’t imagine my life without doing theatre.