In the history of cinema, there are few careers that compare with that of Jeff Daniels. From the early ‘80s to the present day, with few exceptions, Jeff Daniels has been an in-demand actor for prime lead and supporting roles in high level projects on film, television, and the stage. His latest role as Charlie Croker in Netflix’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s behemoth of a novel, A Man in Full, finds Daniels stretching himself as far as he’s ever gone. Charlie Croker is a big character, and Daniels, often known for his gift of subtlety, had to match the size of the part he was playing.
To put it mildly, writer (and show creator) David E. Kelley, along with directors Regina King and Thomas Schlamme bit off a lot in taking on Wolfe’s sprawling tome. Charlie Croker isn’t just a rich man with a lot of moral flexibility, he’s a man who feels the need to be seen as both important and good. All the while, the forces of debt are clawing at his heels, yet Charlie still attempts to find the time to assist the significant other of his secretary, who has been imprisoned for striking a police officer. Kelley has to weave these storylines through sic episodes that are as complex as they are entertaining. One thing is for sure, if the show had missed on the casting of their leading man, they would have been sunk. Daniels carries the show with hubris, frailty, and surprising moments of decency. The balancing act is all his, and however tightly strung the high wire, Daniels walks it with aplomb.
As a side note: Daniels and I were both born in the south (he in Georgia, me in Kentucky), but we both moved to Michigan at a young age and turned into full-fledged Midwesterners. That sense of middle of the country humility can be found here in my chat with Daniels. An actor who is among the very best of his generation, but carries himself with the humility of a Michigander.
Awards Daily: Because of the challenging nature of his books, Tom Wolfe has not always been a writer whose work studios have jumped at to adapt.. You have Bonfire of the Vanities, which is considered by most to be a film that didn’t work. And then you have The Right Stuff, which was a nonfiction piece that did, even if few saw it. Charlie Croker in A Man in Full is an incredibly significant part, not only from the standpoint of the series, but also in a literary sense. How did you prepare to play someone who is so big in so many ways, but who you also wanted to make human?
Jeff Daniels: First thing on Tom Wolfe, you read his books and he’s very smart, but structurally, he’s all over the place. A Man in Full is an example of that, as well as The Bonfire of the Vanities. There are several different stories floating around that could be their own books. His thing is to throw it all up in the air and then weave it all around into a third act that somehow comes together. I think that’s what David E. Kelly tried to do with this 700 page novel which I had read right after David and Regina (King) came to me with it. I just had the first episode and I could tell that Charlie was unlike any character that I had played before. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I said yes. That’s kind of where I’m at with my career. I risk things now. It’s what keeps me interested. I just don’t want to repeat myself or even brand myself, which has been going on for decades. I mean, Clark Gable was Clark Gable, right?. I get that. I just wasn’t interested in that. Dumb and Dumber is a perfect example of me going way over here and then pulling it off. Charlie Croker was somewhere in the middle of the riskiness of a Harry Dunn and an Atticus Finch.
He kind of fits into a place, a character, I haven’t done. The key to him for me was the accent, which Tom Wolfe had described as larger than life and at times unintelligible. When he goes Baker County, you cannot understand him. Wolfe wrote it a lot better than that, but that’s basically what he said. I said okay, I don’t have to find the perfect Atlanta accent. I can kind of fictionalize it and blow it up a little bit. So I was on YouTube quite a bit, doing voice lessons, and a couple of the dialect guys that are online made sense. Then I listened to a couple of Southern senators tell a five minute joke at a luncheon in Birmingham, Alabama or something. They were preaching to the crowd, if you know what I’m saying. They start up, and they just kind of fall into it even more than they would when they were in Washington. So I said, that’s it. I just did that and just started blowing it up. Then I got Regina on the phone and said do you want to hear it? I started doing it for her and she goes yes, thank you. Perfect. Thank you. That was it. So I came in and I told her, and I told David, I’m coming in big. Charlie Croker’s big. He’s larger than life. I mean, he pays for his own 60th birthday party, pays Shania Twain to come and sing to him. It’s very Trumpian, like we’re ignoring who wrote the checks for it. At least Charlie actually wrote checks. That was the launching pad. The first scene we shot was the scene where I’m coming in and greeting all the guests, and there’s Shania Twain. I walked towards her as she is singing to me and just stood there with a big smile going I paid for it, sing. I emailed David and said I found him. I got him. I mean, under the lights and all that, bang howdy comes, I got him.
Awards Daily:There’s something about Charlie’s sort of largesse, the need for more, the need to project confidence. Even though inside he’s under great duress. This book was written in the late ‘90s, and has been updated to present day for the series, but I assume you saw parallels in a certain modern figure.
Jeff Daniels: Yes and no. I know some people in Atlanta and play golf with a couple of guys down there, and everybody in Atlanta had read the book. Everybody knew. When they knew I was coming down to Atlanta to shoot it, they’re going oh God, yeah, I know the three guys that Tom Wolfe used as Charlie Croker. I got a couple of names and Trump wasn’t even in the equation, which will disappoint him, but that’s okay. (Laughs). As you’re shooting it, you’re just going well, that’s why it’s relevant to today. Maybe in the late ‘90s, those guys flourished. The corruption was just okay. It’s how it’s done. It’s the way it is. You get a hundred million dollar loan for a building and you spend 20 million on a plane. That’s okay. Well, not now. I think that’s the difference. I think Trump, much like Charlie Croker, is being held up and examined in a way that maybe they weren’t in the ‘90s. Maybe it’s the fall of that largesse. The dinosaurs became extinct at a certain time. That’s what it felt like. I’m like the last of this kind of breed, because David updated it to now. And we’re going to watch me for six episodes go into free fall. Maybe it’ll be the end of that kind of person that uses money for things other than what he’s supposed to.
Awards Daily: You’re talking about a person who basically built a building as a monument to self, which I think ties into current events.
Jeff Daniels: Charlie puts his Croker name on a building, Croker Concourse, but people have been doing it before Trump. He’s just the worst at it. That’s all. (Laughs).
Awards Daily: I agree that Charlie isn’t overly Trumpian. He just happens to have some parallels. Charlie, at heart, wants to be a good man, and he wants to believe he’s a good man. You see that in the efforts he makes with Conrad, trying to get him released from jail. He also makes the decision not to do a thing at a certain press conference that would sink a certain person’s career if he did it. Charlie does want to hold on to some level of decency.
Jeff Daniels: There is goodness in him, but I think with a lot of these guys, that kind of money changes it. I don’t understand that. I’ve been around that kind of money. I just can’t comprehend the amount of money that a Jeff Bezos has, or a Bill Gates has, or those kinds of guys. Charlie wasn’t one of those guys. But, you owe the bank 800 million dollars and you’re too big to fail, that kind of money, That’s the line you don’t cross with Charlie. Do not screw with my money. That’s his holy grail. Yeah, there is goodness in him, but when that gets threatened, that turns him into a raging warrior, trying to defend himself as he’s falling off a cliff.
Awards Daily: I think that there’s a larger point to be made here on the show, which is the idea of a country built on debt. Charlie’s whole world is built on debt. If you think about any number of what would appear from the outside to be incredibly loaded people, and look at their balance sheet, their actual solvency might be shocking to see. Charlie’s aware of this, but he makes sure that his chest is puffed out appropriately that no one looks behind him.
Jeff Daniels: Same thing as in The Wizard of Oz, pulling the curtain. I think that it does. I look at the debt that this country has, and I’m going what? It’s going up how much a day? The guys that just borrow more money, borrow more money, and again, I’m an actor, I’m not a banker. I don’t know anything about money, but I agree. I think they’re the guys that just live off other people’s money. I’ve always been a guy that wanted to be debt free, so I didn’t like that.
Awards Daily: We’re Midwesterners. We think that way.
Jeff Daniels: I just got out of my mortgage and everything. It was one of the greatest feelings, probably not great for tax purposes, but I don’t care. As an actor, with the precariousness of this career, whether it lasts a month or a year or 10 years, 20 years, or in my case 45/47 years. Get out of debt, just get out of debt. At some point, as an actor, they’re going to pull the plug on you, and I owe how much? I just did not want to be in that position, and fortunately the career kept going and going and going, and now I’m able to breathe.
Awards Daily: You have been able to sustain one of those rare types of careers where you’ve been relevant almost from the moment you landed in the early ‘80s to now, getting great parts in great films and television shows. I think that the career of most actors is closer to that of an athlete where you’re fortunate if you have a great 10 year run. I’m sure you’ve worried about it, but you’ve almost always been able to stay in the place where you were getting good opportunities.
Jeff Daniels: I got out of the gate real quick with Ragtime, but particularly Terms of Endearment, Purple Rose of Cairo—Woody, Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild. I was on a run. Mike Nichols’ Heartburn. I did some indies that nobody saw. That hurt. And then I did Dumb and Dumber, which people tried to talk me out of doing, but that bought me ten years. Gettysburg was matched against that. It was like oh my God, look at the range, which is what Clint Eastwood told me in 2002 when I did Bloodwork. But then it slowed down. I got into my fifties and I was either getting stupid Dumb and Dumber ripoff comedies, or nothing. So I picked up the guitar and I was clubbing. I was playing and writing songs and I have a whole one man show that I do. I thought that’s where I was headed.
Awards Daily: The Lookout was somewhere in there, and that’s really good.
Jeff Daniels: The Lookout—Scott Frank. Yeah, but there was no momentum to them, and, yeah, the hot streak was over. Then I did a play. I was doing a bad movie in LA, and I got a script called Blackbird by David Harrower, about a pedophile being confronted with a 27 year old woman in his place of work, and she wants to talk about when I abused her when she was 12. The play starts with me dragging her down a hallway, throwing her into a conference room where I work, and basically saying, what the hell are you doing here? I changed my name, I went to prison, what do you want? It’s a 90 minute nightmare. I did that off Broadway, and we were the show to see. We were downstairs at the city center, Manhattan Theatre Club, 300 seats. Dustin came, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward came. Meryl came. We were the thing to see, me and Allison Pill.
That led to God of Carnage. Matthew Warchus put me in that with Jim (Gandolfini) and Hope (Davis) and Marcia (Gay Harden). And God of Carnage led to Aaron Sorkin. Now I’ve got The Newsroom. Now I’m on a hot streak. It was really kind of a domino thing, but it came from taking a risk on that Blackbird play. Since Newsroom, that’s where the good writers and the good writing we’ve held out for has come my way. When you get the stamp of approval from Aaron Sorkin in Newsroom, in that Northwestern speech, which will outlive us both, that means something. Then here comes Scott Frank again, after Lookout, with Godless. He said I don’t know if you can do this, but I think you can. I said I’m in. And The Looming Tower, and all that. Then here comes Aaron Sorkin saying we got the rights to To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway. I mean, it just started to roll. So now, late in my career, it’s almost like I outlasted all those guys that had the athlete’s career, that lasted 10 years or something like that. They made their money. They made a lot more money than me, but I’m real proud of this third act I got going.
Awards Daily: Back to Man in Full, I really loved the May/December marriage with Sarah Jones’ character, Serena. It does not play out at all like you would expect. She’s beautiful. She could fit the role of the trophy wife, if that’s what he was looking for, but she seems to have just as much power and significance in the relationship as you do, which is unusual to see in a movie about a man who, in this case, is pushing 60 and Sarah’s character is roughly half Charlie’s age.
Jeff Daniels: They did a good job with that role, I’m glad you took that away from it. There were a couple of scenes, one was shortened, that kind of fell more into how much he needs her, and then a later scene was cut altogether. There were a lot of cuts that they were making, but that would have deepened it even more. I’m glad you took away that there was more than just the trophy wife thing or the sex going on. There was an actual connection there. Sarah and I worked hard on that.
Awards Daily: Now I want to talk about my favorite part of the show, which is you and Bill Camp. Even the first scene: you’re sitting on opposite ends of this really long boardroom table and it’s almost shot like a tennis match. Your head keeps swiveling back and forth between you and Bill. Can you two do like six things together? I don’t care what they are.
Jeff Daniels: (Laughs). If I got to do six more, I’d love it. We met on Looming Tower. He had done a show on HBO The Night Of, he was a detective, Steve Zaillian wrote it. He was great in that. Right from the get go on Looming Tower, I thought this guy’s good, I love this guy. They asked me about him for American Rust, and I said yes, yes. That wasn’t as much fun because of the character he played. We didn’t have that much to do together. We did have fun on Looming Tower. He would have to do a long winded, FBI thing on all the countries that we’re worried about: Morocco and Kenya and France. I’d go what about Kansas? It was just to get him to burst. We just immediately had fun together anyway. So there we are sitting in Atlanta. I said Bill, I’m coming in big. I told Tom Pelphrey the same thing, do not leave me hanging. Go with me. That’s what this is. This is larger than life. I’m begging you. They both rose up. Those conference room scenes for us were just a joy. We’d get to cut and we’d look at each other going oh, boy, it could be the end of a career right there. I kept asking the camera operator if I cracked the lens. (Laughs). Regina never came around the corner. All three of us expected Regina King, Oscar winning actress, director, to come around the corner and go terrific, wonderful, but let’s try one a little less, just turn it down. Never happened. So that was permission for us to go wherever we wanted.
Awards Daily: There is a facility with vulgarity that is necessary in the character of Charlie Croker. I’m thinking about the scene where you talk about all the ways you’re going to “fuck em.” That had me in complete stitches. Was it enjoyable for you to be able to let it rip like that?
Jeff Daniels: Absolutely. I’d have to look at the book again, it’s been too long. I don’t know whether David came up with all of that, or whether some of it was from the book, I imagine it’s a hybrid. “Jesus Balls Almighty” was just one of the favorite phrases I’ve ever gotten to say in my career. I don’t know why, I’m not proud of it, but there it is, and the various ways you could fuck ‘em. There’s a scene where we’re walking into the building, Tommy Schlamme directed it, and my accountant is trying to be nice, telling me what to do. I’m going, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Aml (Ameen) is playing my lawyer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Head, ass, mouth. (Laughs). Just, boom, and then in. That was a fun scene to shoot.
Awards Daily: One of Charlie’s worries is, like he says at one point, I don’t mind turning 60, I mind being weak. This is when he’s getting his knee surgery, a robotic knee, and he’s got a hand that doesn’t work quite right. It is this physical breaking down of his body that culminates in his downfall despite his desire to sustain himself any way he can.
Jeff Daniels: I wrote a song and there’s a lyric in there, “Even the high and mighty end up six feet in the ground”. You can have 800 million of somebody else’s money and all the planes and quail plantations in the world, but at the end of the day, you’re going to hear a church organ. I think that’s just the mortality of it all for Charlie. His body is breaking down while his will to still be that powerful, that popular, that rich, is still there. It’s his money. That’s his holy grail. It’s the money, the money, the money, the money.