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 sf@talkeasypod.com.

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