Jeff Daniels — Embracing an Unexpected Path
Jeff Daniels loathes snakes. Loathes them. But while filming Netflix’s new drama series A Man in Full, in which he plays a real estate mogul barreling toward bankruptcy, the actor had to film a scene with an actual rattlesnake. The slithering reptile was in a glass case, but that didn’t assuage Daniels’s fears. “I can’t deal with snakes,” he says. “Nobody with a brain in their head is going to pick up a rattlesnake unless you’re a rattlesnake wrangler. But we did 10 takes of me trying to tap—tink, tink, tink—on the glass, and I told myself, ‘I’m not going to blink. I’m not going to move.’ ”
Daniels, 69, has faced his fears in the past, but they often had more to do with acting choices during his decades-long career than reptiles. There was the time he took the plunge into comedy starring alongside Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber or tackled the iconic role of Atticus Finch in a Broadway production of To Kill a Mockingbird, which earned him a Tony nomination. And while building a career that’s led to an Emmy-winning performance as a cable news anchor on HBO’s The Newsroom, he also made moves in his personal life, shunning the glare of Hollywood and ruckus of New York City in 1986 to bring up his three kids with his wife, Kathleen, 64, in Chelsea, Mich., where the population hovers around 5,400 people.
Almost 40 years later, he doesn’t regret settling down in the Midwest. “I didn’t want what happened to some other people to happen to me. I didn’t want to get contaminated by stardom,” he says. “For the family, staying away from all the fame stuff felt like the right decision.”
While Daniels worked steadily over the years, with unforgettable performances in films and shows like Something Wild, The Comey Rule and The Squid and the Whale, he grew roots in his hometown. He opened the Purple Rose, a nonprofit theater where he serves as artistic director and has written 22 plays, including a comedy premiering this fall based on a story from a Michigan newspaper. “The headline was ‘Office Christmas Party. Grinch in Fight With Rudolph. Police Called,’ ” he explains.
“When I saw that, I said, ‘That’s a comedy. I don’t know who these people are, I don’t know what happens, but I’m going to write it.’ And so I did.”
His kids have chosen to stay close by. Lucas, 36, works as an artistic associate at the Purple Rose, and Nellie, 33, teaches U.S. government at a public high school. Ben, 39, wears several hats, working with his dad on the podcast Alive and Well Enough, which explores Daniels’s life as an artist, and serving as an audio engineer when the actor records audiobooks and voiceovers or narrates projects.
Daniels has also toured the country playing guitar with the Ben Daniels Band, which includes his son and daughter-in-law Amanda. “We’re in vans going from gig to gig and five-hour drives and showing up playing at some 200-seat club,” he says. “It’s a way of sharing what I do with them but also featuring and empowering them. You give them that solo in a certain song, and they’ve got to do it every night in front of a crowd.”
Performing and recording music feeds into his desire, decades ago, to become a full-time musician if acting didn’t pan out. “That’s what I was going to do,” he says. “I’ve got 20 years of gigs, which isn’t bad for somebody with a day job. I really enjoy it. There’s no director, no studio, no editor, no writer. You’re all of it—and I like that.”
As Daniels’s acting career went through its ups and downs, Kathleen, whom he married in July
1979, has been the rock he’s relied upon time and again. “In the good times and the bad, she’s been
a leveling influence—my biggest fan, my biggest cheerleader—telling me, ‘It’ll be okay. You’re going to get something else.’ It turned out she was right,” he explains. The actor, for his part, has learned the key to making a marriage, or at least his marriage, last. “Know when to shut up,” he explains. “Mansplaining is a disease, and the cure is to just stop talking.”
Reflecting on his approach to work in his 60s, Daniels admits he’s more discerning and less hungry to prove himself as an actor. “I think the thing that goes away is the ambition. That quest to be the biggest star in the history of stars, that’s gone,” he says. The turning point came once he finished his Broadway run with To Kill a Mockingbird: “After Atticus Finch, I can’t top that experience.”
Playing the chief of police alongside Maura Tierney in the Prime Video series American Rust, which debuted its second season in March, was a project he dove into following a phone call with his agent. “He goes, ‘What do you want to do?’ ” Daniels recalls. “It had taken 44 years for me to hear that, but that’s when I knew I’d made it.”
Now, aside from coming within inches of rattlesnakes for A Man in Full (now streaming), there’s little need for him to take risks. “I don’t feel like I’m risking my career now because I’ve got this catalog of performances behind me. I’ve kind of done it. I think, ‘Well, who wants me next?’ But if nobody does, well, that’s okay too.”