“I’ve taken the long, winding, scenic route to whatever success I’m having,” Jeff Daniels says, reflecting on his career. “But I wouldn’t have told you five or ten years ago that I’d be going the way I am going now. I thought it’d be over to be honest. And a big, big reason for that is Aaron. There are actors who said that they couldn’t have done [The Newsroom]. It’s the demands of the dialogue, much like Jobs. It’s a lot of work to get on top of Aaron’s words. After Newsroom, there were a lot of people in the business who thought, ‘Well, if he can do that….’”
After a 30-year career filled with performances in films as varied as Something Wild, Speed, Goodnight, And Good Luck, The Squid And The Whale, and Dumb and Dumber, Daniels’ career hit a major purple patch when he was cast in the Aaron Sorkin-scripted HBO series The Newsroom as broken-down anchorman Will McAvoy. And while the series has wrapped now after three seasons, it certainly boosted Daniels’ career. “Oh God, yeah,” the actor says when asked whether his career was stalling pre-The Newsroom. “Well it kinda goes that way with trying to achieve longevity in a business that doesn’t care if you’re here on Tuesday or not. I’m now into my fortieth year, and it’s never been better than it is right now. And not just with the quality of people I’m getting to work with, but the respect in the industry, from other actors, post-Newsroom, means a lot.”
And he’s scored another excellent role at the hands of Sorkin, tackling former Apple CEO, John Sculley, in the Steve Jobs biopic, directed by Danny Boyle and starring Michael Fassbender . Formerly the president of Pepsi-Cola, Sculley was lured to Apple in 1983 and oversaw the company during one of its most tumultuous periods, which saw his relationship with Jobs sour and the Apple founder ousted by his own team. Without Jobs’ vision though, the company faltered. “It’s such a Shakespearean fall what Sculley goes through,” Daniels says of his character. “So really, in that first scene, I even stood differently. I’ve met with Sculley; there’s still some pain there, they never reconciled. If there’s pain there, then the relationship was important to him, even cherished.”
It’s interesting to hear Sculley’s take on his own character’s arc given that Michael Fassbender has described Sorkin – the man who also scripted The Social Network, Moneyball and The West Wing – as a modern-day Shakespeare. Would Sculley agree? “I see a similarity in is the music and the rhythm,” Daniels says. “Shakespeare had that obviously, and all the great ones… Mamet has it, Lanford Wilson is a great Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, had this music to it. And as you memorise Aaron, you pick up the rhythm. It may be a lot of words, and it may be words that you can’t believe would be in sentences sometimes, but there’s a rhythm to it, and then you get on top of it, and then you can dance on top of the words. I equate it to – you have to get it in your head so that it feels like it’s the 100th performance of a Broadway or West End play.”
Given the daunting challenge of tackling the dialogue, there isn’t a lot of room for improv when it came to the words themselves. “There were some discussions during Jobs, but we didn’t have time for that on Newsroom,” Daniels says. “Plus it’s how we are in the theatre… This is the play, do it! In Hollywood everyone thinks they’re a writer. And especially actors on a set… You have this skewed vision of what the movie is; it’s from your perspective only. And it’s the director and the writer, guys who sit back who can see the bigger picture. Maybe what you think isn’t necessarily what it should be.”
Steve Jobs is released in cinemas on February 4.
