THE MOCKINGBIRD MAN
Jeff Daniels on becoming Atticus Finch, making music, the tug of family and his home state—and the power of theater.
When Jeff Daniels walks onto the stage at the Shubert Theatre in New York City and delivers his opening lines as smalltown Southern lawyer Atticus Finch in Broadway’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the audience reaction is electric.
In this latest rendition of Harper Lee’s classic novel, Daniels reimagines the iconic character, who is called upon to defend an innocent black man accused of raping a white woman. The actor puts the same heart and soul into every one of what will be 400plus performances of the play (his run is for a full year), set in 1930s Alabama, because he wants the audience to be moved by what they’re seeing onstage.
“The audience reaction—the laughter and the tears and the power of it—is not lost on me,” he says.
For Daniels, 64, it’s been an exciting four months since
Mockingbird—adapted for Broadway by Hollywood screenwriter, director and producer Aaron Sorkin—opened in December. And despite the grueling schedule of eight shows a week, this veteran actor knows he’s having his moment, and so is the production, which is playing to sellout audiences and reported record-breaking box office sales this spring.
“It’s a role of a lifetime and I’m old enough to know how special this is,” he says during an interview in his dressing room, filled with photos of his wife, Kathleen, and their three adult children, shelves full of books and a much-used
espresso machine. “And I’m trying to give the performance of my life every night.”
He’s nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role, and Mockingbird has eight other nominations for the 2019 Tony Awards, which will be handed out during a live telecast June 9 on CBS.
“You want to be invited to the big dance,” says Daniels, who has won a pair of Emmys and was nominated for Tonys in 2009 and 2016 for his performances in the plays God of Carnage and Blackbird, respectively. “To say otherwise isn’t true. But you do your show every night, and if you’re lucky, you get to go to the prom.”
Attacking the Role
The Broadway play is an update on the book, first published in 1960, and the movie version made two years later, which starred Gregory
I’m trying to give the performance of my life every night.
Peck—who won an Academy Award for his role—as Atticus.
The stage drama reflects today’s societal challenges, and it’s narrated by adult actors playing the role of Atticus’ daughter, Scout; his son, Jem; and their visiting friend, Dill.
“You read the book, you watch the movie but you feel the play,” says Daniels, who hopes audiences won’t compare the play to the book or the film. “We looked at the play as if Peck’s Oscar-winning performance didn’t exist. I had to hit the delete button on it and attack it as if I was originating the role.”
To Kill a Mockingbird has stood the test of time, he says, because of its monumental themes of inequity and injustice. “The novel did a great job of putting the horror of racism in front of white
America,” he says. “And
I think both Harper and the movie went as far as they could go comfortably in the early ’60s. It came out just before Martin
Luther King and just before the Civil Rights
Act. And back then, you kept your mouth shut, much like in the play, where Bob
Ewell comes to ask if
Atticus is really going to be defending Tom Robinson—because if he does, we had a line in the play that we took out: ‘That your house?’
‘Yes, it is.’ ‘Mmm . . .
Want to see it torched?’”
Dramatic Start
Daniels’ creativity blossomed in high school in his hometown of Chelsea, Mich., where, not surprisingly, he excelled at writing.
“We read A Farewell to Arms and one of the assignments was to write a new last chapter,” he says. “I got an A-plus without even thinking. In trigonometry and chemistry and algebra, it was all I could do to get a D-plus.”
His career on the stage began when a high school director needed guys for her production of South
Pacific. “I was in choir and she knew I could sing, so she grabbed me coming out of basketball practice and said, ‘Say these two lines and do a funny dance,’ ” he recalls. “I was thinking, I have no time
for this, [but] she cast me and then she cast me again.” Daniels as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway (top) and in (1) Terms of Endearment (1983), (2) Dumb and Dumber To (2014), (3) The Newsroom (2012–14) and (4) Gettysburg (1993)
Acting came naturally. “I could get onstage in front of 700 people and I knew exactly what to do, how to time things, how to hold a pause,” he says. “I needed technique and training, but there was a natural ability, and that pushed me to New York.”
In the Big Apple in the ’70s, Daniels discovered the Circle Repertory Company. “This was the first time I was around all these living, breathing playwrights,” he says. “I had never seen those people before, and they fascinated me.” When he wasn’t watching those playwrights at work, he would write songs and play guitar.
“The songwriting was something I could do while I was sitting in my apartment waiting for the phone to ring,” he says. “It kept me creatively alive and engaged.”
After some early smaller roles in movies and TV, he made a strong impression in the all-star ensemble cast of
Terms of Endearment (1983) alongside Debra Winger, Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson, and his film career was off and running. Roles in movies like The Purple Rose of
Cairo, Heartburn and Something Wild made him one of Hollywood’s young rising stars.
As his career began to really heat up, Daniels—who had married wife Kathleen in 1979 (she’s also from Chelsea)—returned to his hometown.
“It’s always been family first, career second, and I think I was always fearful of fame,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons I moved back to Michigan in 1986. I was starting to succeed in film, and that was me going, ‘I just want to be an actor, you hired me to act, I’m interested in between action and cut, that’s what I do. I don’t need the rest of it.’”
In 1991, finding his comfort zone back in the Upper Midwest, between New York City and Hollywood, he opened the Purple Rose Theatre Company in a former used-car and bus garage in Chelsea that was once owned by Daniels’ grandfather. As he rediscovered his roots in theater, he wrote his first play.
“I wrote a play that
worked,” he says with a smile. “Had it not worked, I probably would have tried again, but not as hard.”
Passing It On
Over the years, Purple Rose has grown—and thrived. The theater produces four shows (with actors performing six shows a week) for 42 weeks of the year. Daniels was hands-on during the theater’s early days. “I taught students everything I ever learned at Circle Rep, and now others teach the actors that are coming through,” he says. “Audiences are buying tickets for plays they’ve heard nothing about, based on our reputation.”
And his mainstream acting career kept going, even from Michigan, with roles in such films as the campy horror yarn Arachnophobia, the Civil War dramas Gettysburg and Gods and Generals, the popular Dumb and Dumber comedy franchise and the Aaron Sorkin–created drama The Newsroom. He received an Emmy for The Newsroom in 2013 and for his starring role in Godless, the 2017 Western Netflix miniseries.
“Going all the way out on a limb in Dumb and Dumber with Jim Carrey by your side, then sweeping back into Atticus Finch,” he says. “That’s kind of what I planned; I wanted to have a 180-degree swing.”
He’s has written 18 plays, 400 songs and revels in the fact that he has played more than 300 gigs, many of them on tour with his son Ben, 34, who’s also a songwriter who plays guitar as part of the Ben Daniels Band, the blues-rock group he formed
in 2008. A bonus: Son Lucas, 32, is the band’s tour manager.
“I have friends, but my family are my closest friends,” Daniels says. “I’m happiest when I’m with them, around them and doing things with them.”
Leaving Atticus Behind
Daniels says playing Atticus Finch in Mockingbird is so intense that he must leave him behind as soon as he takes his bow after each Sunday matinee, his eighth show of each week.
“I get out on Sunday at 6 p.m. You feel it. You’re emotionally beat up. I don’t feel like a human being until Tuesday at 2 p.m. Monday I have to be horizontal. I’m a bit of a recluse. If you want me, I’ll be lying down.”
And Atticus? “You learn to hang him up and let him go,” he says. “I think that’s part of running the year-run marathon: You don’t think about the show until you’re here. As soon as you’re done, you forget it as quickly as possible. That keeps you in the present so that the show you’re doing tonight isn’t another one—it’s a new one.”
Daniels views the production as a gift he’s giving to audiences each night. “The American theater still has a role in changing people’s lives and making people think in different ways,” he says.
“Mockingbird is an example of the power of the American theater.”
My family are my closest friends. I’m happiest when I’m with them, around them and doing things with them.