“I’ve always been a gambler”: Jeff Daniels on his career and inventing his unique musical memoir

“There was an intervention,” Jeff Daniels recalls. The Emmy Award-winning actor, playwright and musician is describing a moment 30 years ago when his inner circle was concerned for him.

“My agents gathered on the phone in a conference call and said, ‘We’re going to stop this from happening. You’re going to ruin your career.'” He didn’t listen. And that’s how the man who’s played Atticus Finch on Broadway, a prickly anchorman on “The Newsroom” and a menacing western outlaw on “Godless” wound up saying yes to “Dumb and Dumber.”

In a career spanning five decades, Daniels has always been, in his words, “a gambler,” an everyman chameleon who never wanted to be a brand. At the height of his box office appeal, he moved to Michigan and started a theater company. Instead of seeking tentpole projects, he pursued his music, releasing albums and playing gigs.

And now, as he approaches his 70th birthday, Daniels remains as determined to keep surprising himself as ever. His latest project is the second season of his Audible original, “Alive and Well Enough.” The intimate, witty project is a snapshot of Daniels’ life, with reminisces of his experiences with the likes of Meryl Streep and Mike Nichols interspersed with songs and fictionalized vignettes. “It’s a musical diary, basically,” Daniels explains.

In a career defined by big swings and unconventional moves, the challenge for Daniels is always to just keep surprising himself. And the secret of his longterm success? “I didn’t drop the ball,” he says. 

Watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Daniels here, or read the conversation below, to hear more about why he believes you don’t need to be in New York or Los Angeles to have a creative life, and what playing Reagan in an upcoming film made him understand about contemporary American politics.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You’ve been a musician your whole life, but now you are the creator of what you call the “memoir, music and performance” Audible original, “Alive and Well Enough.”

It was designed to be unlike anything else. My agent had called me a couple of years ago and said, “You’re the only actor who doesn’t have a podcast.” I said, “Is that a problem?” He goes, “I think you could do it.” I thought, “OK, here’s the deal. Don’t make me invite guests. Don’t make me call up my celebrity friends. I’ll do everything. I’ll write it, my son Ben and I will produce it. We’ll put music in there.” 

I’ve been writing songs for 40 years. It’s like a personal diary, a musical diary, basically. I build these stories around the music or things that happened to me. I try to make it as entertaining as possible. I try to write with a sense of humor, which I think is essential, especially now. I learned a long time ago from playwrights in the ‘70s that you have to find your voice as a writer. The sense of humor leads me to mine, and I try to talk about stuff that happened to me over [my] career in a way that people who aren’t in the industry can understand it. They get behind the scenes of what it’s like to work with Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson – and what did I learn from those people? That’s what I focus on, and I try to make those stories as well-written and as entertaining as possible.

Listening to it is like sitting down and having a conversation with you and you’re telling me these lively, funny stories, and then you’re going to sing me a song.

Yeah, which leads me to a song, and the next thing you know you’re going, “What?” But I did a lot of audiobooks and soon into doing that, you learn that you’re reading it for one person. That’s the little trick. It’s different than movies. It’s different than being on a stage on Broadway with 1,400 people. It’s one person. 

When you start to tell the story to one person, whether they’re on their treadmill or walking or whatever they’re doing, it’s like you’re talking to them. The actor in me can make that sound like I’m saying it for the first time, even though it’s written. There’s a little bit of improv in there, but not too much. It’s just like an actor, your job is to take the script and make it sound like it’s just falling out of your head. That’s what I do.

This was conceived as two seasons. What is different about this season that distinguishes it from the first?

Initially this was a podcast, whatever that means, which means it’s not one season or two, it’s as many as you can do. When Audible Originals kindly said, “Oh, we’ll take whatever you’ve got.” I went, “Well, I’ve written two seasons.” There’s going to be more. I’ve written three, I have four about half-written, and I see 10. 

Sometimes it’s just opinions or some fictional story. I’ll take a song that I’ve written and then turn it into a short story that leads into the song. I’ll do sketch stuff like “Snack Time with Harry Dunn,” where Harry Dunn gets to interview the actor who played him in “Dumb and Dumber.” I get to play both parts. You write it and then you record it like it’s the Bob and Ray radio show, where it’s back and forth between these two guys. Just, the two guys happen to be me. 

I’ll take scenes from plays I’ve written for the Purple Rose Theatre Company in Michigan. I’ve written 22 plays, and I’ll just do a scene from that. I’ll tie all this stuff in such an entertaining way that hopefully people will connect with it. 

At the end of two seasons, even the end of three seasons now with the outline, there’s so much more. I love writing. This memoir on Audible Originals, it’s like the perfect place to do everything I can do, whereas an actor, you’re in front of the camera, you’re on a stage; playwright, you’re turning the play in – I get to do all of it.

You’ve said, “People ask me, why haven’t you written a memoir?” Your answer is, “It’s this,” because you get to do everything.

I heard that when you do write a memoir in book form you have to go on a book tour, which involves a lot of cities and sitting in bookstores and signing books, and I didn’t want to do that.

This is the perfect place for me to put it down. It’s also great with my son, Ben, [being] the sound engineer and helping me with the musical arrangements and all that stuff. It’s a two-person thing and that’s as much a joy as anything, doing it with him.

You’ve collaborated with Ben before, you’ve toured together. What was it about this particular project that made you want to collaborate on this?

Well, he knows music in a way that I don’t. I can write folk songs that are topical, funny songs for an acoustic guitar, but when we go beyond that, he’s really good about hearing other things. We’ve got several songs in the memoir where it’s not just me and an acoustic guitar at a desk. He’s the sound engineer, I don’t want to deal with that. I write it, if he hears something that doesn’t sound right, he’ll go, “What’s this? Yeah, let me fix that.” But once I give it to him, then he deals with Audible Originals and their audio people who are meticulously exact and detailed about what they want it to sound like. He spends a lot of time with them making sure that what you hear is up to their standards. That’s something that I don’t want to do, and he does.

Revisiting experiences you have with these actors on all these classic films, have you gone back and said, “Oh, actually this is a different story than I’ve been telling myself all these years”?

I did better than I thought. That’s the thing when I start to think about the people I worked with, name people, big-time people. I held up. I didn’t drop the ball. I wasn’t fired after the first movie with Mike Nichols or anything. I lasted, but I was always, “onto the next, onto the next, onto the next, onto the next.” Only after “To Kill a Mockingbird” on Broadway did I step back and go, “OK, you’ve done it. What do you do now? Let’s go back in and find out how you held up or how you were able to do that.” 

I discovered that I’ve always been a gambler. Moving to Michigan after four movies to what, operate a movie career out of Michigan? Are you kidding me? Who does that? In 1986, I did, and it worked. The fact that I would gamble on certain things like “Dumb and Dumber.” There was an intervention, my agents gathered on the phone in a conference call and said, “We’re going to stop this from happening. You’re going to ruin your career.” I did it anyway. 

I also learned that I challenge myself, which is a lot more work than not challenging yourself. You can do a movie and have it be a billion dollar movie, and that’s who you are. Clark Gable was Clark Gable was Clark Gable. That’s a brand, and you go to see Clark Gable. It’s the same thing with any big star now today. I didn’t want to do that. I kept changing it. I didn’t want to brand myself as one thing. The challenge of risking failure, I’m still doing it. That’s what I’ve been doing for 50 years, is challenging me. Going, “I bet you can’t do this role.”

You’ve talked about meeting fellow actors at a similar place in life, or who are a similar age, and saying, “We’re still here.” What does it take to still be here?

I just did a movie in Iceland with J.K. Simmons. We were both from Michigan. We’ve circled each other for years. We finally got to work with each other, and that was the feeling — we pulled this off, we lasted. We outlasted everybody who didn’t, because it’s a youth-oriented industry. They don’t care if you’re here next week or not. They really don’t. There are plenty of other people who could do this role. But if you get to a certain point where you’ve established yourself as somebody that could do something that’s definitive, that after you’re done doing it. “I can’t imagine anybody else in that role” — that’s always the goal.

When you get with actors who’ve done that, there’s this exclusive unspoken club of that kind of risk-taker, that kind of preparation. I think of people like Meryl, and De Niro, and Pacino, Hoffman and those guys that just dove in and gave it everything like an NFL athlete. They attack a role like an athlete does to train, to prepare, to get ready for the shooting of it, the going on stage and to be able to do that over decades.

I remember 20 years ago talking about casting a role in a movie with my agent and I said, “Well, what about so-and-so?” He goes, “No, he’s over.” “Excuse me, what? He’s over?” “Yeah.” I said, “Hmm, has anyone told him?” Because we’re the last to know. 

On Tuesday, “You’re done, you’re over. Give me a young Jeff Daniels,” that whole thing. To have lasted and to come across a fellow actor who, you just have this look in your eye going, and you don’t even have to say it, “We’re still here.”

You’re playing Ronald Reagan in this movie with J.K. Simmons. What does it mean to take on someone who is so embedded in our cultural memory? What does it take to do that?

It’s threading a needle. I can do a show like “A Man in Full” where I have to come up with a big southern accent and be this fictional guy out of Atlanta. That accent can be anywhere, but Reagan has to be [perfect], and that was seven months of trying to get that. The whole movie is over the weekend that Reagan and Gorbachev spent in Reykjavik, Iceland trying to lower nuclear weapons. They met in a a semi-private summit to see if they could do that. It’s a famous meeting. We shot in Reykjavik in the house where they met, in the room where they sat, in the chairs where they sat. There was this wonderful aura around it that kind of helped you. Jared Harris was Gorbachev. J.K. Simmons was George Shultz. Hope Davis was Nancy Reagan, and I challenged myself again. Hopefully, I pulled it off. I’m told I did. We’ll see.

Moving to Michigan almost 40 years ago is taking a chance. For people who think, “If I want to have a creative life and I want to be an artist, there are two places I can do it in America,” you are challenging that idea. What has having that distance and perspective meant to you as an artist?

First of all, art and artists are local. You start there. You do not have to succeed on the coasts. As someone who lives in Michigan who grew up in the Midwest, we’ve got a lot of very smart people there who can write, so write about where you are. That’s what we do at the Purple Rose Theatre Company in Chelsea, Michigan. We do a lot of new work with Michigan, Midwestern playwrights, and I tell them, “I’m not interested in your inner truth. I’m interested in you writing about the audience that’s sitting in these seats or that lives around here. Write for this corner of the country, paint for this corner of the country.” 

You don’t have to be a big star, become a national celebrity or go to Nashville to be validated as a musician. You can do it right where you are. Art is what gives us wings. Even if it’s just the paintings that you’re doing that you’re displaying at your local church once in a while or that gig you’re playing in the bar where you drop in those two songs that you wrote in between all the covers. You’re doing it, and that’s OK. I’m all for that. 

The one thing I’ve learned as I’ve been writing the memoir is that the place where it all comes from hasn’t changed, whether it’s to play a role, or to write something, or the music. That person who creates hasn’t gotten any older, they still have the energy. I may not have the ambition [of previous] decades, trying to get that next movie, that next role – that’s gone. I’ll do stuff that I want to do that’s challenging, but that energy to create something, I can’t shut off.

You are a political guy. How are you doing? How is everyone doing after the election? How are you feeling about living in Michigan in this moment?

Some around me are doing better than others. Look, I was one of the guys that said, “This is the opportunity for a new America, an open society, inclusive, where we take the best of the best of all of us, where it truly becomes equal and fair and respectful to all, representative of everyone.” It deals with the 400-year-old original sin of slavery. We were finally going to deal with that, and it looked to me like it was going to happen, and then it didn’t. 

I told a couple of people, “We’re going to find out who we are.” What I’m concerned with now is more like, in two years will [this] still be who we are, or will it be worse? Are we living through a time in American history where 50 years from now they’ll look back as the end of democracy happened now? I hope not, but I don’t trust people with absolute power, and I think they think they have it, and we’ll see. 

If there will be people who find that the price of eggs is going to go up and that tariffs are going to hurt them, when it starts to affect them personally, financially, maybe that’ll change the minds of some people who thought it was OK to try him again. But I think we’ve lost character, and integrity, and decency, and respect for the rule of law. I think that’s flown out the window, and I don’t think social media is going to help us fix that. We live in the era of outrage, and I don’t know, I’m hopeful, but what am I supposed to do?

This may be absolute chaos, the incompetency not only of Trump himself, but of all the people he seems to be parading. Is there a relationship with Putin that we haven’t had before? Having just done the Reagan/Gorbachev thing, it’s night and day. The U.S., Russia, even as tough as it was in ’86, I don’t know where we’re going. I fear that Trump doesn’t either and that he’s going to get played, but I’m just an actor. What do I know?

I was going to ask you what you think your character from “The Newsroom” would have to say about all this, but frankly, you just gave it to me.

Well, that’s probably a softer version. McAvoy would be on one of his rants.