The Stories of Actor Jeff Daniels

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2024

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Actor Jeff 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.

He joins us this week 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).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Ben Nadefaffrey, host of the history show The Last Archive, and I want to tell you about a new series we're running in our feed.
0:06.4	It's called The Dead Line. Six essays written and read by Jill Lepore,
0:11.2	the New Yorker writer, American historian, and founding host of our show.
0:15.9	These are incredible essays on everything from the history of Cryogenics to the Silicon Valley
0:20.4	Gospel of Disruption.
0:22.3	And at the end of each essay, I interview Jill about her craft as a writer.
0:26.0	You can listen on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
0:29.0	or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:33.0	Pushkin. You're going to be here. This is talk easy. I'm San Francisco so.
1:01.0	This is talk easy. I'm San Francisco, so. Welcome to the show. Today I'm joined by actors, songwriter and playwright Jeff Daniels.
1:20.0	I've been hosting Talk Easy for eight years now and one of the byproducts of making something every week at least for me is that I have a lot of friends and family
1:30.0	Especially my mother and father that will send text messages to the effect of
1:34.8	how's it going where have you been are you gonna take three weeks to respond to
1:40.7	all 37 of my very funny memes, how come you don't call more?
1:45.7	These are all very fair and justifiable questions, especially from my mom and dad.
1:51.2	And I have to imagine for most people listening this is a typical refrain you've had
1:56.1	from your parents or if you are a parent and have kids you've probably sent that text
2:02.2	had that call.
2:04.0	And so I've come up with a solution to this,
2:06.0	which is what if I could solve this very real problem I'm having in my life
2:11.0	through the show itself. What if instead of taping a typical
2:16.9	intro for Jeff Daniels I just try calling up my father and have him guess who's coming on the program this week. This is just an
	...

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