“It’s the biggest acting challenge of my career, which I think I knew when I took the job,” he says. Malina, 57, acknowledges the role of Hermann Merz was a new direction for him.

Clean-shaven, button-down-shirt wearing, usually bespectacled, cerebral do-gooders who would easily blend in on the DC Metro. The beard is new, grown for the part, and as we talk it is hard for me not to compare his current look to the television characters he is known for: The West Wing’s Will Bailey, Scandal’s David Rosen, Sports Night’s Jeremy Goodwin. The play, which ended its run on Broadway in July, follows the extended Merz family for three generations, from the 1890s to the 1950s, and from glory to destruction. It’s a Friday and Malina is on the tail end of his eight weekly performances-“eight Kristallnachts a week,” he jokes-as Hermann Merz, the patriarch of the sprawling Viennese Jewish family in Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard’s Tony award-winning production. “I promise I didn’t just wake up, even though I look like it,” Joshua Malina, dressed in a T-shirt and sweats, sporting a slightly graying beard, tells me when we speak over Zoom from his dressing room.