Trouble looms for the US
Jeff Daniels embraces a complicated hero in The Looming Tower, writes Ellen Gray and Julie Hinds.
Jeff Daniels couldn’t see himself in John O’Neill, the dapper, driven FBI agent he plays in The Looming Tower. He liked that. ‘‘I just didn’t recognise the guy as anything resembling me,’’ the Emmywinning star of The Newsroom says.
The Looming Tower is adapted from Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks.
‘‘You start with you, and you pull truth out of you and then put the character on it. You know, inside out. But I didn’t have a clue as to where this guy was inside me, not a clue. And that keeps you interested.’’
O’Neill, an Atlantic City native who’d spent years tracking Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, was the book’s tragic hero, destined to become one of the nearly 3000 people to die on September 11, 2001, in one of the attacks he’d long sought to prevent.
‘‘What happened to him floored me. I mean, you can’t write [fiction like] that, but it happened,’’ Daniels says.
The series mixes real-life characters, among them O’Neill and Lebanese American FBI agent Ali Soufan (Tahir Rahim), with some said to be composites, including Peter Sarsgaard’s CIA character, Martin Schmidt, and takes other liberties in the name of drama.
‘‘But in terms of understanding the roles that these agencies played and how they tracked al Qaeda at the time, what their successes were and what their failures were, I think that’s pretty accurately presented in the main,’’ says Alex Gibney, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning documentary film-maker who’s one of the show’s executive producers.
O’Neill is portrayed as a largerthan-life presence who butts heads with the CIA over its failure to share information and whose personal life is so complicated that executive producer Dan Futterman told reporters, ‘‘We had to winnow out girlfriends in order to make it a comprehensible story.’’
‘‘He kept going to the wrong places to try to fix this anger inside of him,’’ Daniels says of O’Neill, whose ability to charm, and deceive, the women in his life stands in contrast to his inability to keep any part of what he considered the truth to himself while on the job.
‘‘Complete contradiction, yeah. That’s interesting, that’s human in a big way, and that’s what makes him, I think, such a great character,’’ Daniels says. ‘‘They’re both equal, that deception in his personal life and yet righteously carrying the flag all the way to [then-White House counter-terrorism adviser] Richard Clarke [Michael Stuhlbarg] and the CIA on his professional side. And he was right on that side, and completely wrong on the other. And he couldn’t stop either one.’’
In researching O’Neill’s manner, Daniels says he had only one 1997 Frontline interview to go on.
He told Mark Rossini, a former FBI agent who worked with O’Neill, ‘‘’This is not an impression. It’s going to resemble him, but it’s what he thought, and how he thought it, and that you should recognise. And the spirit of him’. And Mark ended up being very happy with whatever it was he saw,’’ Daniels said.
‘‘It’s just how I do everything – [Netflix’s] Godless, everything, Newsroom – you think like the guy. Figure out how he thinks, and if there’s some externals, you’ve got to wear a moustache or something, OK. But if you start thinking like him, then maybe people like Mark Rossini will recognise him.’’
He believes the events depicted in The Looming Tower still have relevance for 2018.
‘‘We had brilliant, we had experienced, we had knowledgeable, we had competent in the late 90s,’’ says Daniels of the American government’s leadership and landscape two decades ago. ‘‘And 9/11 still happened, because divided we fail. Where are we today? We’re more divided and you might want to take out brilliant, experienced, knowledgeable and competent, certainly when you’re looking at the top.’’ Daniels continues.
‘‘And [you] go, ‘Do you feel safer? Do you feel like we’ve learned anything? Do you feel like we’re in a better position [now]?’ Which is what art does. It asks questions, and I think it asks some serious ones.
‘‘Who are the heroes today? Who’s going to be the hero? Is it [special counsel Robert] Mueller? Is it [FBI director] Chris Wray? Is it someone inside the White House? Is it going to be [defence secretary Jim] Mattis? Because certainly at the top, we’re not seeing it. We’re seeing the manchild,’’ says Daniels.
‘‘Who’s going to jump in front of the train and save the day, save America, save us from whatever it is is going down? That’s what I start to look for. Who are the people who are going to step forward and put country before party or before covering up whatever it is they’re covering up?’’ - TNS
The Looming Tower 8.30pm, Thursdays, from March 15, SoHo.