Jeff Daniels is taking on the role of former FBI chief Jim Comey for a major new drama. Donal O’Donoghue meets him
The story of former FBI director, Jim Comey, and his battles with US President Donald Trump are the stuff of a new drama. Donal O’Donoghue talks to the star of The Comey Rule, Jeff Daniels
“It’s always a pleasure to be around actors who are without bullshit,” says Jeff Daniels of Brendan Gleeson, his co-star on The Comey Rule. “I rst met him two months into the shoot. By then I had two months of Jim Comey under my belt and now we get to see Donald Trump. e rst scene we did was the loyalty dinner. And Brendan was ready on take one. is isn’t Alec Baldwin doing a SNL sketch. is is the beating heart, if such a thing exists, inside Trump: the darkness, what he’s thinking. And when you’re three feet away from Brendan Gleeson and he’s looking at you and asking you for your loyalty you know exactly what he means.”
e Comey Rule, whose tagline is ‘whatever side you’re on, you only know half the story’, is essentially a tale of two men, FBI director, Comey and US President, Donald Trump. Forged primarily from the former FBI man’s best-selling memoir, A Higher Loyalty, it is a forensic dramatisation (intercut with news footage and archive interviews) that tracks the months leading into the 2016 US Presidential elections and the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton as well as the Bureau’s subsequent investigation of Russian interference in the election. In e ect it is the principled civil servant (Daniels) versus the mobster President (Gleeson with shades of e General’s Martin Cahill). Written and directed by Billy Ray, the threeand-a-half-hour mini-series is served up in two halves; pre-election and post-election. If the rst is driven by exposition and sometimes hard going (especially if you’re not wised up on recent US history) all that is blown apart by the arrival of Gleeson’s Trump, like the shark in Jaws, early in part two. Here is a mobster in political clothing who has Comey in his crosshairs. Gleeson’s performance is formidable, giving a realness to the most recognisable, and most parodied, person on the planet. In his encounters with Daniel’s beleaguered FBI director, especially a grotesquely intimate dinner for two in the White House (“I need loyalty! I expect loyalty”) we see the blood beneath the ngernails, the darkness in the heart. Gleeson and Daniels are supported by a strong ensemble cast that includes Holly Hunter as acting Attorney General Sally Yates, Michael Kelly as FBI Deputy Director, Andrew McCabe and Scoot McNairy as deputy Attorney General, and unreliable narrator, Rod Rosenstein. Daniels came directly from playing Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird onto the set of e Comey Rule last November. “To go into Comey nine days a er the last bow-out on Broadway was like running a marathon and someone handing you a glass of water and saying, now turn around and run another one,” he says. “But e Comey Rule mattered. It was a project that was risky, one where I could fail. You don’t walk away from things like that.”
Daniels’ performance has been likened to that of James Stewart’s in Mr Deeds Goes to Washington, an honourable man trying to do the right thing but caught up in a web of politics and duplicity. “Because Comey is such a polarising gure, and people have such strong feelings, many negative, about him, it was important to have an actor who has an instant credibility and likeability,” says Ray. Yet the Capraesque comparison only goes so far for a story whose legacy is still unfolding, a nightmare from which many are trying to awake. “When you peel it all away the story is about taking on power,” says Daniels. “It’s one man taking on something far more powerful than he is and that is a universal story.” Daniels did little to physically resemble the six-foot eight-inch Comey. “ ere was never
To go into Comey nine days after the last bow-out on Broadway was like running a marathon and someone handing you a glass of water and saying, now turn around and run another one
any discussion of prosthetics or whatever you might do to reform my face,” he says. “I put on a hairpiece and had li s in my shoes to feel as tall as Jim. I also worked on the voice a little bit, watching interviews and online videos. Other than that Billy and I decided to just show the audience what he is thinking. So that’s what we did.” And Daniels, who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, is in no doubt about the signi cance of his latest role. “Not everything you do as an actor matters or counts or can have an e ect on the audience in a way that might change them,” he says. “ is had all of that. It was relevant, not only then but today and it’s not o en that you get to tell a story that we are still living.” “ ere have been two phases to my career as I look at it,” he continues. “One was take the best thing that you’re o ered at the time just to support my family. So everything leading up to e Newsroom was all about what’s the best that’s out there. Sometimes they were really good projects like e Purple Rose of Cairo, Something Wild, even Dumb and Dumber. But a er e Newsroom I got interested in acting again and staying with it. e Newsroom bought me ten years. It bought me Godless, Looming Tower, Atticus Finch and it bought me Jim Comey. ose are all complicated roles and you risk failure every time you go out there. And a er 44 years of doing this, that’s what I need to do, risk failure and challenge myself in order to stay interested.” e Comey Rule was originally scheduled for release in the wake of the US election until Ray, and others, pushed hard for a pre-election slot (it premieres in the US on September 27). “We saw what the Russians did when interfering in the 2016 elections and we all felt it was important for Americans to see it before the 2020 election,” he says. Ray has also said that he truly believes that US democracy is on the line right now and before the nal credits roll on e Comey Rule we get the message that the Russians are still interfering in the US election. “ is can be a very disturbing time to be a public servant and this show is a homage to those people,” says Ray of a series where you are le in no doubt about the good guys and the very bad guy. For this, and other reasons, critics in the US are divided on The Comey Rule, on its power as a drama, its timing and its impartiality. But this is compelling TV, heightened, not lessened, by its arrival in advance of the November elections. “I think that the show will inform people but I’m not so sure about in uence,” says Daniels. “People are going to nd out why Jim Comey did what he did and what he was thinking when he did it. In retrospect, looking back four years, when I saw the nished show I got to the end and thought ‘Omigod it was just the beginning!’ And it also tells people not to believe everything coming out of the White House. ere are two sides to this story: one is that Trump said Comey is a liar. e Comey Rule is the other side. Now go vote.”
““When you’re three feet away from Brendan Gleeson and he’s asking for your loyalty you know exactly what he means