Jeff Daniels
could be taking it easy.
The Emmy Award-winning, and Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Tony Award-nominated actor could be still coasting on the success of his turn as the lead of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, which came to an end in 2014, and which felt like the gilded cherry atop a career cake that has encompassed everything from The Purple Rose of Cairo to Dumb and Dumber, The Hours, Good Night, and Good Luck and The Squid and the Whale. But this year has been amongst Daniels’ most productive, starting with a barnstorming performance as the villainous outlaw Frank Griffin, the antagonist of Scott Frank’s superlative Netflix Western Godless. As an ensemble of actors including Jack O’Connell, Michelle Dockery, Merritt Wever and Scoot McNairy scramble for survival in the Old West, Daniels’ Griffin and his posse of misfits haunt every scene; even the ones they’re not in. And if you doubted Daniels range, look to Hulu’s The Looming Tower, the show from Dan Futterman, Alex Gibney and Lawrence Wright, which adapts Wright’s searing non-fiction book about the internal squabbling that led to the US Government’s failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks from happening. Daniels plays John O’Neill, the FBI’s New York counterterrorism chief who was shooed away by his superiors when he attempted to raise a red flag about the potential of al-Qaeda to attack on American soil. Daniels’ preoccupation with the detail of Wright’s book, and Futterman’s first scripts, made The Looming Tower an irresistible leap for the actor, despite his initial fears that he had no in with the character of John O’Neill. On a brief visit to Los Angeles from his native Michigan, Daniels explains his drive to keep rolling the dice on the parts he takes even after all these years, and his need to author work that has something to say to a society teetering perilously close to disaster.
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PHOTOGRAPH BY
Josh Telles
5/4/18 11:56 PM
