Play It Again: Jeff Daniels

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Today, for your holiday week, we’re returning to one of our favorite 2024 conversations with actor Jeff Daniels.

Daniels is always writing. Plays, songs, a script or two. Even in interviews you get the sense the Michigan native is trying to relay the stories of his life in a way he’d find compelling as a reader, or listener. Bystander — as a viewer.

We sat in April around the latest chapter of his crime series American Rust (12:30), reprising his role as Police Chief Del Harris. It’s a performance inspired by his midwestern upbringing in Chelsea, Michigan (16:06) and the formative teachings of theater director Marshall W. Mason (21:20). Then, Daniels reflects on his arrival to New York City in 1976 (24:06), performing in Lanford Wilson’s play Fifth of July (27:20), and his early on-screen roles in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (31:10), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (34:20), and Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (44:20).

On the back-half, we walk through his years making The Newsroom (51:48), working with screenwriter (and then playwright) Aaron Sorkin (53:20), and how the two of them reimagined Atticus Finch and To Kill a Mockingbird for both Broadway (59:49) and what he calls “a country at a crossroads” (1:05:33). To close, we sit with the utility of good writing in this fraught era (1:10:30), and a musical tribute to his late father, Robert (1:15:32).

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