Play It Again: Jeff Daniels

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2024

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today, for your holiday week, we’re returning to one of our favorite 2024 conversations with actor Jeff Daniels.

Daniels is always writing. Plays, songs, a script or two. Even in interviews you get the sense the Michigan native is trying to relay the stories of his life in a way he’d find compelling as a reader, or listener. Bystander — as a viewer.

We sat in April around the latest chapter of his crime series American Rust (12:30), reprising his role as Police Chief Del Harris. It’s a performance inspired by his midwestern upbringing in Chelsea, Michigan (16:06) and the formative teachings of theater director Marshall W. Mason (21:20). Then, Daniels reflects on his arrival to New York City in 1976 (24:06), performing in Lanford Wilson’s play Fifth of July (27:20), and his early on-screen roles in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (31:10), Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (34:20), and Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (44:20).

On the back-half, we walk through his years making The Newsroom (51:48), working with screenwriter (and then playwright) Aaron Sorkin (53:20), and how the two of them reimagined Atticus Finch and To Kill a Mockingbird for both Broadway (59:49) and what he calls “a country at a crossroads” (1:05:33). To close, we sit with the utility of good writing in this fraught era (1:10:30), and a musical tribute to his late father, Robert (1:15:32).

Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected].

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello podcast fans. It is I, Bruce Valanche. For over 25 years, I worked on the Academy Awards, so you didn't have to.
0:10.3	In that time, I've seen and heard things that should not be seen or heard or certainly felt.
0:17.7	And now, for the first time, I'm sharing all my behind-the-scenes stories and first-hand knowledge
0:23.0	about the Oscars, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the slap, all the things you didn't see.
0:30.2	So join me as I use humor and insight to break down the Oscar Awards of the past to explain how
0:36.3	and why your favorite movie didn't win, why some actors
0:40.9	and some directors had to fire their agents, and how the whole process works or sometimes doesn't
0:47.9	work. This is the Oscars. What were they thinking? Available wherever you get podcasts. This is Talk Easy. I'm Stan Forgoso. welcome to the show.
1:43.4	Today, I'm joined by actor, songwriter, and playwright, Jeff Daniels.
1:47.0	I've been hosting Talk Easy for eight years now,
1:52.6	and one of the byproducts of making something every week, at least for me, is that I have a lot of friends and family, especially my mother and father, that will send text messages to the effect of
1:58.6	how's it going? Where have you been? Are you going to take
2:03.1	three weeks to respond to all 37 of my very funny memes? How come you don't call more? These are all
2:09.6	very fair and justifiable questions, especially from my mom and dad. And I have to imagine, for most
2:16.4	people listening, this is a typical refrain you've had
2:19.8	from your parents, or if you are a parent and have kids, you've probably sent that text, had that
2:26.5	call. And so I've come up with a solution to this, which is, what if I could solve this very real
2:33.2	problem I'm having in my life through the show
2:36.8	itself? What if instead of taping a typical intro for Jeff Daniels, I just try calling up my
2:43.6	father and have him guess who's coming on the program this week. This is just an experiment. We may
2:49.9	not do this every Sunday, but I thought
2:52.3	after eight years and 400 episodes or so, why not try something a little bit different?
	...

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