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TheBrief TIME with ...
Playing Atticus Finch on
Broadway, Jeff Daniels
marvels at the appetite
for public decency
By Karl Vick
The day is cloudy and so is Jeff daniels.
The actor has walked to Central Park directly from
watching the news conference in which Attorney
General William Barr defended President Trump
in the moments before the release of special coun-
sel Robert Mueller’s report, and it has done even
less for his mood than the drizzle that arrives at the
park entrance with him.
“I’m waiting for the hero,” Daniels growls, after
sitting gamely for a portrait with the two Austra-
lian shepherds he has come to walk. The older one,
Magglio, is named for a Detroit Tigers outfielder
his daughter had a crush on in high school. Scout
joined the family last summer after Daniels signed
on to play Atticus Finch in a new Broadway pro-
duction of To Kill a Mockingbird. Aaron Sorkin
adapted Harper Lee’s 1960 novel for the age of
Trump, and the show’s roaring success is fueled by
the steady combustion of liberal sensibilities and
the kind of news Daniels is stewing over.
“It’s exactly what Mockingbird is about,” he
says of Barr’s news conference. “You know, it’s
about, where’s goodness and decency? It’s respect
and honesty and truthfulness and ‘do unto oth-
ers.’ Where is that? I didn’t see it this morning. I
haven’t seen it for two years.” He pauses to pick up
after one of the dogs. “But the country is divided
between people who want to believe it and people
who don’t believe it. Dangerous times.”
Daniels in real life sounds a bit like Will McAvoy,
the cable anchorman he played in the HBO series
The Newsroom, another Sorkin creation. The show,
which ran from 2012 to 2014, got mixed reviews.
But the declamation McAvoy uncorked in one epi-
sode, on “Why America is not the greatest country
in the world anymore,” has been viewed upward of
20 million times on YouTube. It’s a self-critical sum-
mons to remembered greatness that makes its ap-
peal from pretty much the opposite pole as a Trump
rally, and it suits Daniels as comfortably as the Atti-
cus Finch that Sorkin wrote with him in mind.
“Usually, how it works, the actor gets a job and
two weeks into a 12-week shoot is calling the agent
going, ‘What’s next?’ Or, ‘Get me off this set. Get
me out of this movie.’ That’s not happening with
this,” Daniels says. He’s doing eight shows a week.
There’s a bit of makeup from last night’s perfor-
mance on his right temple. “You got one of the
great fictional American heroes, maybe just a great
16 Time June 3–10, 2019
American hero because people think he’s real. And
you’re onstage at the Shubert Theatre, the Carn-
egie Hall of Broadway, as it was described to me.
Riding Aaron Sorkin like he’s Secretariat.”
At the Shubert, Daniels draws cheers just walking
onstage. “People,” he says, “are jumping to their feet
every night.” The $1.77 million the show took in the
first week of May set a record for an American play
on Broadway. And it’s up for nine Tonys, including
one for Daniels for Best Leading Actor in a Play.
“There’s all that,” Daniels says, “and then
there’s the thing that happens, I don’t know, three
or four times a month—what a gift: I’ve had promi-
nent people coming back with tears in their eyes
DANIELS and just overwhelmed. So changed, rocked, moved
QUICK that 15 minutes after the curtain came down,
FACTS they’re in the restroom and they’re still crying.”
He’s still walking, eyes straight ahead.
“The American theater has a voice.”
Stage hand
Daniels first
appeared on At 64, DAniels came to gravitas the long way.
Broadway in His breakout role was playing the weak, unfaith-
1980, with ful husband of a dying woman in Terms of En-
Christopher dearment. “I certainly wasn’t on the leading man’s
Reeve in
Lanford square-jaw track,” he says. “But the guys I mod-
Wilson’s Fifth eled after, or loved, were Jack Lemmon and Dick
of July. He was Van Dyke, Alan Arkin in The In-Laws, Peter Sell-
nominated for ers’ Pink Panthers, Strangelove—guys that could do
a Drama Desk comedy and drama. And comedy’s always been a
Award.
second- class citizen, a lesser art form. There’s little
Guitar man gravitas in a guy getting in trouble in Something
In 2012 guitar Wild,” he says, referring to his 1986 crime comedy.
maker C.F. But theater, like Daniels, is limber. He moved to
Martin & New York City in 1976 to work at the Circle Reper-
Co. issued a tory Theatre, and remained invested in the stage
Jeff Daniels
model. ‘‘I think throughout his film career. “At no time did I stand
they sold 53 in the first day of rehearsal of a play and have any-
of them, which one say to me, ‘Could you do what you did in that
wasn’t bad for last play, just do it here?’ Which is what Holly-
an actor.”
wood’s all about. ‘Do you have a brand yet? Do you
Homeboy have an image yet? Can you play to that? Don’t
Daniels is deviate from that, it’s not why we hired you.’ So
writing his that was the choice behind Dumb and Dumber”—
18th play for the 1994 Farrelly brothers comedy that had him
his hometown
stuck by frozen urine to Jim Carrey on the back of a
theater. “I
want all of our motor cycle. “How out-of-the-box can I go?”
playwrights Far enough, apparently. In just the past two years,
to write about Daniels has starred in the Hulu series The Looming
the people Tower as a legendarily troubled real-life FBI agent,
sitting in our in the Net flix western Godless as a one-armed child
seats. Hold a
mirror up.” killer and now he’s Atticus Finch. In his hometown
of Chelsea, Mich., where his father served as mayor
and Daniels and his wife chose to raise their fam-
ily, he founded the Purple Rose Theater Company,
named for the 1985 Woody Allen movie that made
him a leading man. He doesn’t mind the time away
(his Mockingbird contract runs through November).
“I relax more here than back there,” Daniels says.