Loyalty put to the test
Jeff Daniels knew it would be a challenge to play James Comey, writes Michele Manelis
WHEN director Billy Ray approached Jeff Daniels with an offer to play the much-maligned former FBI director James Comey in a new documentary-drama, The Newsroom and Dumb and Dumber star worried it was beyond him.
“He came to me and said, ‘I want you to play James Comey,’ and my first thought was, ‘I don’t have a clue how to do that.’ Then I thought, ‘I’ll say yes, and figure it out later.’ What keeps me interested at this age,” the 65-year-old tells The Guide, “is trying to do things that I don’t automatically know how I’m going to do. So I commit to it and then figure it out on the fly.”
Daniels may have jumped in at the deep end, but it wasn’t without a safety net. “I said to Billy, ‘I’ll only play him if you get great actors around me. I don’t want you to save money and just get anybody. I’ll play tennis with them, and if I’ve got something great coming at me then I can come back’,” he explains.
“So we got Holly Hunter to play Sally Yates [former US Deputy Attorney General, who testified during President Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings to enormous acclaim] and we got Michael Kelly [Doug Stamper in
House of Cards] as Andrew McCabe [Comey’s successor after a one-year stint as Deputy Director], and then once we got Brendan Gleeson [who is mesmerising as Trump], we knew we had a good chance of it being good.”
The new two-part series, to stream over consecutive nights, was based on Comey’s memoir A Higher Loyalty, and shines a light on the behind-the scenes shenanigans playing out between Comey, whom Daniels portrays as a morally upstanding public servant, and Gleeson’s malevolent, bombastic Trump.
Comey was appointed FBI Director during the Obama administration in 2013, and his dismissal came in 2017, by Trump’s hand; a fate he learned of by watching a news report on TV.
The first part of the series focuses on Comey’s distanced relationship with then President Barack Obama (Kingsley Ben-Adir), which is in sharp contrast to the way he’s treated by the President Trump.
Part two concentrates on the Comey-Trump relationship and its spectacular and very public disintegration.
As Daniels explains: “We knew the Trump version, which is that Comey was a liar, but we didn’t know Comey’s side of the story or how he felt in those moments. Reading the book helped me get there.
“He did what he thought was right, to protect the FBI, but certainly it was politically damaging, and some say it cost her the election.
With the 2020 election looming, Daniels is blunt about the duty of the country’s voters.
“I think Americans need to put their phones down and get educated,” he says.
“My optimism tells me that because of the past three-and-a-half years, we know a hell of a lot more about Trump than we did back in
2016. I fully hope that the American public is paying a little bit more attention.”
THE COMEY RULE STREAMING, STAN