Star of new TV series, The Looming Tower, the actor spoke to Variety’s Actor on Actor series about navigating his career and more.
Star of new TV series, The Looming Tower, Jeff Daniels recently participated in Variety’s Actor on Actor series with Laura Linney from Ozark but the interview was not necessarily about his latest series that is about 9/11 and the war between the FBI and the CIA bur rather how he thinks he still hasn’t made it.
Answering a question about whether he thinks he’s made it, Daniels noted, “It depends what your definition of ‘making it’ is. Is it having a million bucks in the bank, or being in a movie that’s No. 1, or getting a multi-picture deal with some studio? Is that making it? We did Squid and the Whale, and is making it the reaction you get from someone who walks up to you who says, ‘I just saw Squid and the Whale. My family was divorced. Oh, that movie!’ Is that making it? I think that’s making it.”
Speaking about learning things over the years as an actor and The Looming Tower, Daniels noted, “In my sixties, I have a pretty good idea of how to do this, so now instead of doing a brand, instead of Laura Linney the action star, that’s who you are. My side is full of those guys. And what’s so great about Ozark, about Looming Tower, about all those shows is the writing. And people like us get to risk failure. We get to try things. We get to take all that stuff we’ve learned and test it, and those are the actors I watch. Those are the ones I pay attention to, not the ones who are going, ‘Let me do that thing I did over and over and over again’.”
Speaking about working on Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom that fetched him awards, Daniels revealed, “You never will know what’s going to come because they don’t know, so you’ve got to give up. I give it up. Newsroom was like that. Aaron Sorkin would write an episode at a time. So I played the moment, played the episode. This is all I know. I don’t know what happens next month in my own life, and so I try to look at it like that.”
Responding to a question about the misconceptions that come with acting and how it is perceived by others, Daniels stated, “No. I think making a living in it is making it. That’s where I live. There’s a longevity club. Because so many of our friends who are equally talented, maybe more so, are out. Or they didn’t have the drive, or they didn’t have that relentless ‘I’m not giving up.’ I sit with college kids and I go, ‘You have no idea what it is you’re going to need inside of you to withstand the rejection that I still feel in my sixties.”
– With information from Variety.com
