Susan

Lore & Background

Susan Ross has been embedded in Selina Meyer's orbit for years before the presidency, long enough that the two of them share a language of unspoken grievances and shared trauma that no new hire could ever replicate. She is the one who fielded the phone calls, drafted the memos, and quietly corrected the record while Selina was still a senator, a governor, and a candidate. By the time the series opens, Susan is not just an employee; she is institutional memory with a pulse, and she carries the accumulated weight of every bad decision Selina has made since the 1990s. Her function in the Veep world is both practical and comic. Comically, she is the show's primary vehicle for audience identification. Where Selina is a force of nature, Susan is the weather station that keeps logging the damage. Her exasperation is the show's metronome, the steady beat against which every absurd escalation is measured. What makes Susan's loyalty so specific and so painful to watch is that it is never framed as devotion. It is framed as competence. She stays because she is the best at this, because leaving would mean someone worse takes over, and because somewhere beneath the sarcasm and the clipped New York vowels there is a genuine, if deeply buried, belief that Selina is capable of being good on her best day. She is wrong, of course. But she keeps hoping, and that hope is the most human thing in the entire West Wing.

In Their Own Story

The fluorescent lights in Situation Room B hum at a frequency that Susan has, over the years, come to associate with the exact moment before Selina says something that will require a press secretary, a lawyer, and possibly a small act of diplomatic fiction to contain. She is standing at the credenza, refilling her coffee for the third time, watching Selina pace the length of the table while a junior aide types furiously and tries very hard not to make eye contact. 'Okay,' Selina says, stopping. She has a look. The look. 'I want you to know that I think the whole thing with the senator is actually a compliment.'

Susan sets the coffee down. Slowly. With the care of a woman defusing something. 'Selina.'

'What? He said I was the most interesting woman in the room. In a room full of people who are, frankly, not.'

A silence. The fluorescent hum. The junior aide's fingers freeze over the keyboard. Susan picks up the coffee again, takes a sip she does not need, and says, in a voice so flat it could be a geological survey, 'I'm going to need you to stop talking for approximately four minutes. I'm going to need the press office to draft a statement that says you said nothing. And I'm going to need you to, for the next forty-eight hours, not use the word "interesting" in any public context.'

Selina nods, already turning back to the window. Susan exhales. She has done this before. She will do it again. She refills the coffee.

Reader's Guide

Susan Ross enters the series in Season 1 as Selina Meyer's Chief of Staff, already deep into a relationship that predates the presidency by many years. She is the operational backbone of the White House: the one who actually manages the press, the calendar, the staff, and the sheer volume of nonsense that Selina generates on a daily basis. Matt Walsh's performance is built on a foundation of controlled, simmering New York exasperation, and it holds the entire ensemble together. Her arc across the seasons is less about dramatic transformation and more about the slow, grinding erosion of patience. In the early seasons, Susan's reactions are sharp, clipped, and almost surgical. As the series progresses, the exasperation deepens into something more weary, more resigned. She stops being surprised. They are just Tuesday. Her signature verbal tic is the flat, two-syllable address: 'Selina.' Delivered in a register that could be a prayer, a threat, or a eulogy, depending on the context. She also has a habit of physically stilling herself mid-sentence, as if her body is trying to leave the room while her mouth is still obligated to stay. She does not raise her voice. She never needs to. Her relationship to Selina is the show's emotional spine. She is not a friend, not a confidante, not a rival. She is the person who has to make the next thing work. And she does. Every single time. That is both her power and her prison.

Did You Know?

• Susan Ross is played by Matt Walsh, the comedian and political commentator, in a sustained cross-gender role that is central to the show's ensemble.
• Susan's loyalty to Selina is established as spanning many years of political service before the presidency, making her one of the longest-tenured members of Selina's inner circle.
• She serves as the show's primary audience surrogate: her reactions to Selina's decisions are the mechanism through which the audience is invited to feel the full weight of the chaos.
• Susan's exasperation is a running structural device across all seasons; the show frequently uses her physical stillness and flat delivery as a comic punctuation mark after Selina's most absurd pronouncements.