Jeff Daniels Breaks Down His Career, from 'Dumb & Dumber' to 'The Newsroom' | Vanity Fair

in a business where fame is fleeting and you're over by tuesday what do i have to do as an actor to live longer in this business than my one and only hit that became kind of the overall mission of my career hi my name is jeff daniels and this is the timeline of my career the challenge is against the system and it's a system that's freaky kathy not us we want what's ours the first role i ever had was in the last season of hawaii five-o with jack lord it was 1979 i was doing a play in los angeles and then i landed the guest criminal on the second to last episode of the final season went out to hawaii for nine days jack lord was very nice he was a star everyone got to attention when jack lord came on the set the best lesson i took away from it was take care of your hair jack lord had great hair and we were standing on a cliff overlooking you know the pacific ocean and there was wind and i had longer hair and my hair was just doing a dance all over the i look over at jack lord this was happening that was the only thing that was moving was that one little curly bang thing i mean it was a helmet what happens now mr mcgarrett what do you think happens i felt like i was in the door that didn't mean that other doors were going to open but at least i had done a hawaii 5-0 and that my parents and friends and family back in michigan would see it whether i was gonna go beyond or not was anybody's guess my disposable gas mask look there ain't no real damage done just scoop the off take your automobile and get along out of here what do you say i'm not going nowhere until my car is cleaned my first big film was ragtime the highlight and maybe one of the top five highlights of the career was working with jimmy cagney he didn't want to do it he hadn't acted in 10 years he was all of 81 81 going on 101. he'd insisted on having a screen test to see if he could do it they had rented a studio milos is in there there's a black and white tv monitor and cagney comes in and he can't do it he can't remember the lines he doesn't he's it's just gone milo no no no we do we go down to two pages two pages couldn't do it one p three line we do three one lie you do jimmy you do one line one like do this line right there he looked and he looked and he they came up and you could see it that thing that stars have and he lifted and he was jimmy cagney and all those roles you ever saw him and he rattled off the line and milo should good you're going to be beautiful way down here boom and that was it i was too young to know what was what everything meant but looking back to see someone of that stature at the end of his career beyond the end of his career these people had longevity and in a business where fame is fleeting and you're over by tuesday that became a goal i can arrest you for blocking a public service exit for creating a public nuisance and about 10 other things i ain't gonna bother to mention now am i making myself clear you always get a little paranoid in your first few months okay if you are doing something and you're trying to make me feel crazy because i'm bearing our child then you may have just sunk to a point so low that you will never recover i was trying to break into movies i'd get second place or i'd almost make it and it got pretty discouraging and then came along uh terms of endearment talk about going to grad school you're on a set with shirley maclaine deborah winger and jack nicholson what can you learn from them it's that shut your mouth and open your ears raising three children working full-time and chasing women requires a lot more energy than you have deborah said you haven't met jack i said no you're the only one on the set who hasn't met jack well i'm come here boom mr nicholson nice nice to meet you kid what have you done you know well i've done you know some off-broadway um some you know broadway uh and jack said well this ain't broadway this is the pro game he was right in the sense that at four in the morning when you get the close-up is on you and we lose this location today and there's how many thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars rolling every minute you gotta hit it you gotta hit a home run that's the pro game part of film and you gotta know how to do that how to wait wait wait wait wait wait and then be brilliant years later we were doing god of carnage on broadway with jim gandolfini marcia gay harden and hope davis we were the hit of new york everybody came including jack however many years later 1983 to 2009 do the math turned to me before going out the door and said i'm proud of you beautiful tell you the honest truth and probably screw it up [Music] i had gotten out of the gate really strong with terms of endearment purple rosa cairo but i did a couple of indies that nobody saw i loved the scripts but nobody saw him and in hollywood that's it i mean suddenly you're you're on the downward and i told him i got to be in something that that people see it was a good gig great company emblem entertainment i mean it was first class that's when you start to realize oh maybe nicholson was right this is the pro game the catering for god's sakes was just [Music] we have two weeks left of shooting and it was just me and big bob the main spider who was as big as my hand and it would rear up and hiss it would do that they would put a rat in his cage on friday and then on monday they'd take out basically the tail what was left that's my co-star the spider wranglers professional animal people would bring bob out and set him down and i have to be turned away and my hand on the floor and don't cheat a look because bob is going to crawl over to your hand you know the same one that ate a rat on saturday so you know yeah okay great and they're all wearing thick leather gloves that go all the way up to here and they go don't worry if he bites you you'll simply get nauseous that was the hardest part [Music] america should be free ground all of it not divided by a line between slave state and free all the way that was one of those roles that you have to research you have to go to grad school on in my case joshua lawrence chamberlain just to to play him honestly and i even went to the joshua lawrence chamberlain museum i met with the the curator the head person and she basically said in the state of maine where he is revered there is joshua lawrence chamberlain and then jesus christ it's kind of in that order so good luck gentlemen the 83rd pennsylvania 44th new york and 16th michigan will be moving into our right but if you will look to our left you will see that there is no one there because we're the end of the line the union army stops here we cannot retreat he was accessible he was a college teacher you know martin had to play robert e lee and behringer had to blame they were these big military guys i was a college professor who 10 months later ended up on little round top reading military strategy books on the way trying to figure out what to do and here they come he was so relatable that character it made chamberlain even more heroic for me we had some incredible people that helped get us to where we are he was one of them in the end we're fighting for each other you're it quincy's any quizzes you're with these no any questions no starcy's you can't do that can not stand it can't you double stamp that noah races can not triple stamped it no erasies blue make it through you can't triple stamp a double stamp you can't triple stamp a double stamp after a series of independent movies and gettysburg i was kind of dead meat it was the only time in my career i've had to leave michigan to go out and chase jobs and i knew i could do comedy i was doing dramatic roles dramatic roles because we want you to get an oscar and that's the path you're on you're a serious actor i'm going yeah hang on i want to audition for this jim carrey thing i want that no you don't but we'll let you do it okay thanks so i went in auditioned with the fairly brothers who loved me and then i got it and the night before i was supposed to fly out to dumb and dumber to wardrobe fitting and then three days later start shooting my agents in la and new york got on the phone okay this is a crisis meeting this is an intervention you're not going to do this movie 12 year old boys are going to see it and that's it and it's probably going to be and jeff i hate to tell you this jim carrey is a big star and he's a big comedian and you're gonna get wiped off the screen okay thanks for the support one two i'm in the toilet scene the snowball in the head scene and the tongue on the chairlift scene jim's not in those so unless they cut them which is possible i'm gonna score so i'm gonna do this movie and if it's a mistake it's mine but i want to do comedy because this serious actors is just not working for me i can do comedy and if i do comedy then i've got the opportunity to go from joshua lawrence chamberlain and gettysburg to harry dunn and dumb and dumber and in between those two things are jobs years later clint eastwood hires me for blood work and he said if you can do two days in the valley which was a drama and dumb and dumber you can do this yes in dumb and dumber you've got a buddy buddy movie but one of those buddies is jim carrey and jim carrey is a comic tornado he just goes how can i compete with that how can i even stay with that and now jim to his credit is going don't get me a comedian get me an actor because it's two people it's buddies i need someone who's gonna make me listen and make me react the first weekend we were in breckenridge colorado reading some of the scenes and it's not going great i don't have it i don't have it i'm i'm acting like i'm dumb instead of being dumb and i needed some internal thing mine was you have an iq of eight not seven not nine eight second smartest thing i did was make jim the leader you can't both be leaders and that was one of his jim's issues with hiring a comedian they you know it's it's the heart of improv you try to keep it going you try to top each other so jim might do some incredible thing and then a comedian will wait for him to get done and then top it and that's not this movie you want jim to score and so how do i you you put me on a leash i become the follower now i'm not only having iq of eight i'm on a half second delay harry what those are the two keys to getting into harry dunn and it worked beyond what anyone could have imagined yeah and i just love doing it i still love doing jim carrey is a great friend of mine great friend of mine and if they did a third one i'd be there on monday hey want to hear the most annoying sound in the world pop quiz hot shot terrace holding a police host he's got enough dynamite strapped to his chest to blow a building in half now what do you do speed was what actors do to just stay in the business and pay the bills and all of that the first script i got i died on page 22. i'm going well the career is not in great shape but it's not in that bad of shape so i'm gonna pass and they go hang on there's a new draft coming you die later i go okay i'm in and so i show up and you know it's it's an action movie the big building where we run from the ground floor all the way up 52 flights of stairs with our 40 pound packs and ak-47s and burst through the onto the rooftop and go where is he first take come out that door keanu boom like that i'm out cut it yandabank the director comes over why why you with the why are you uh well it's 52 flights of stairs i mean we ran again no no no okay that's the movie we're in 52 flights upstairs walk out boom where is he good actors steal all the time and i remember reading an interview with roy scheider and they talked about that moment when roy was in the boat looking down for the shark and jaws and he's looking down and the camera's looking up and he boom sees the shark the look on his face how did he do it so here i am in that house shooting speed i'm supposed to look over at the thermostat and realize that it's not a thermostat it's a bomb that's about to go off in two three one and then it blows up how you going to play that and i remembered that interview that roy scheider had given how did you do it roy he said i just put my muscles up in my cheeks just had them up and then when i turned and saw it i dropped them hmm boom you weren't what were you thinking i wasn't thinking anything i was thinking drop your cheek muscles that's what i did thank you roy okay yeah uh mom and i are going we're going to separate you're not going to be leaving either of us we're going to have joint custody frank it's okay i've got an elegant new house across the park across the park is that even brooklyn it's only five stops on the subway it's an elegant block the fillet of the neighborhood we'll have a ping-pong table i don't play ping-pong the thing that clicked it for me was the character was unfulfilled artistically he did not get the acclaim he felt he deserved a lot of his books were self-published and yet he considered himself on a par with norman mailer and people are like that disillusioned about where he is and why he isn't where he thinks he should be i hadn't been nominated for an oscar i hadn't won any awards i was just another working actor i know so many people i've worked with on their way up you know that have won oscars i've watched them go and tony's and this and that not me and at that point the career was starting to flounder a little bit and so i just used it i'm as good as they are and resent it and i'm bitter and i just take elements of yourself that you can find that might you might have in common with that person just that much and then pour gas on it and light it i remember using that phrase with noah i said that's what i'm going to do i'm going to take that resentment that all actors have i don't care who they are if you haven't won something and other people have and you think you're better than they are that's the name of the game and i took that and used it so it's a way to use yourself and then channel it through the clothes and the mannerisms and the personnel now you're now you're in his room and now you can become him she still has some of the books you wrote dad why are you taking me to your house on mom's night just a minute you know why people don't like liberals because they lose if liberals are so smart how can they lose a god damn always hey and with a straight face you're gonna tell students that america is so star-spangled awesome that we're the only ones in the world who have freedom it was sorkin and i loved west wing i said what do i have to do to get that so i met aaron at the four seasons hotel in new york breakfast meeting and i had gotten tipped by my agent who got word that he he's just never seen you get angry on film in a way that mcavoy does you can get angry in in whatever movies i might have done but to to go into that crazed irrational rant that social media is full of now hadn't seen me do that so i had to give him a taste of that at that breakfast meeting so i i had a story about working with an actor and it was frustrating and i finally just lost it on the actor and i told that story in the the four seasons breakfast room which included banging on a table which made the glass of orange juice do that and the other people at the other tables go that and that's when sword couldn't get okay all right okay yeah no no good good that's terrific great you've got the job i had it before i left the breakfast table when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world i don't know what the you're talking about yosemite point of fact we're a lot closer to west virginia than we are to pittsburgh more ways than geography but look i understand not everybody likes to have a gun passed around in front of us you think i do think and i can make that known around town no more gun passing now if you'll excuse me i need to make something of a house call officer park when the gentleman is ready can you escort him to the town line philip meyer was doing a reading of american rust his debut novel in 2005 downtown manhattan some bookstore somewhere went to see it my career wasn't in a place where i could get things made until sometime after newsroom and then with cable opening up and everything my agent said to me that thing that you realize is the definition of making it now you get to do what you want to do what do you want to do and so we remembered that book and i had just worked with dan futterman and adam rapp on looming tower and they're the real deal i contacted danny i just said if you see something in this book remind me why i love it and let's do it fortunately he loved it and saw all kinds of things that he could do with the book to take it here and take it there and as an executive producer you can either be completely involved with everybody's job or you can hire really good people and give them the freedom to do the best thing they've ever done i'm not even thinking my m16 is coming up and i'm sighting him i'm leading him a bit and i'm squeezing the trigger and i'm firing and i keep on firing even once he goes down the character of dell there are a lot of things in common with this guy and i hadn't been asked to play somebody like this and that's the advantage of hiring somebody with whom you've worked and done so successfully fudderman could now tailor del harris not only for what he knows i can do but what i haven't done yet now they're tailoring the role for you like a soup all you have to do is act it now hire really good people and turn them loose and fuderman was one of those people certainly the roles i've done since newsroom you can't brand in you can't do something you did somewhere else and stick it onto this next role you're gonna do and so the thing that's gonna keep me going is if i'm challenged as long as that keeps going great the day it stops and i'm repeating myself i'll be done you

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Keywords: american rust, career, career timeline, career timeline vanity fair, dumb and dumber, jeff daniel, jeff daniels, jeff daniels 2021, jeff daniels career, jeff daniels characters, jeff daniels dumb and dumber, jeff daniels film, jeff daniels interview, jeff daniels movie, jeff daniels movies, jeff daniels show, jeff daniels speed, jeff daniels the newsroom, jeff daniels vanity fair, the newsroom, vanity fair, vanity fair career timeline, vanity fair jeff daniels

Id: WFsazlcDlpk

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021