MR VERSATILE STRIKES AGAIN
Hollywood’s favourite everyman, Jeff Daniels, set to wow viewers in new literary adaptation
A MAN IN FULL
FROM THURSDAY, NETFLIX
ACTORS claim they fear being typecast, stuck in the same sort of roles forever, unable to show their range.
That’s not something
Jeff Daniels has ever had to worry about. The 69-year-old Michigan native has tackled every imaginable genre during a screen career that’s lasted almost 50 years so far, from comedy in Dumb and Dumber to horror movie Chasing Sleep. As for thrillers, drama and sci-fi try Speed, Terms of Endearment and The Martian for size.
Most recently, Daniels has popped up in Prime’s crime drama American Rust.
Now he’s tackling another streaming drama, this time based on an acclaimed novel by esteemed author Tom Wolfe. None of the aforementioned productions have much in common, apart from one thing – a good script. It’s something Daniels insists upon before accepting a role.
“The writing has to be so good,” he told the online magazine The Believer. “Because if it isn’t, I’ll get bored and I won’t be challenged and I’ll want off it. A Man in Full, David E Kelly (of Ally McBeal and Big Little Lies fame) is the writer on it. That’s it. They want me? Let’s do a Zoom meeting. Let’s do it. And Regina King was directing. She won an Oscar.
“I mean, surrounding yourself with that caliber of people, even if you’ve never worked with them before, is important. (You’ve created) this wide kind of range. You’ve made it possible for people to go, ‘Let’s try him. I think he might be able to do this.’ That’s exciting”.
Daniels plays Charlie Croker (he shares the name with Michael Caine’s character in The Italian Job, but there the similarities end), a once-powerful real estate agent whose empire is crumbling. Faced with bankruptcy, and with vultures circling, hoping to pick the remaining flesh from his business’s bones, Croker sets out to save whatever he can by any means possible.
Lucy Liu, Diane Lane, Tom Pelphrey and Aml Ameen appear in supporting roles.
But what next for Daniels? Well, as he’s an accomplished singer-songwriter who’s released six albums, we wouldn’t rule out a musical – in fact, we’d welcome it.