Oddly, the biggest hurdle emerged before May even finished the screenplay. Universal wanted Hanks as Stanton. With him, the studio reasoned that it had a hit like The American President, and without him it might end up with a Nixon. "When I made the deal with Universal, I was clear that Tom Hanks was very interested but not set," Nichols explains. "The first big thing that happened was that I had to call Universal and say, 'Remember how I said he's not set? Well, now he's not doing it.'" The buzz was that Hanks had bailed because of his casual relationship with the Clintons. The actor actually had a legitimate scheduling problem. “The truth is, I would have loved to do it, but I couldn’t do two projects,” Hanks says now. “I made a Sophie’s choice on this.”

Thompson had been set to star in the film Nichols had pushed back. Side Effects, a comedy written by May about a senator. So when Nichols put Primary Colors on the fast track, he offered Thompson the Susan Stanton role. The British actress, who hadn’t followed the ’92 campaign closely but was “delighted” that Clinton had been elected, pored over the textbooks on U.S. politics to prepare. Now, back home in London, she knowingly muses on the evolution of the Twenty-second Amendment and discusses the difference between the veto and the pocket veto.

While she admits that she was fascinated by the Clinton connection, her real attraction to Primary Colors was on an emotional level. "Reading a book and [later] a script and thinking about leadership and presidency, partly in relation to the Clintons," she explains, "I suddenly thought, well, hang on a minute. Aren't we actors supposed to examine our leaders from within?'"

I looked over at Jack Stanton. His face was beet-red, his blue eyes glistening and tears were rolling down his cheek….He had the courage of his emotions.