"Grand Tour" Star Jeff Daniels
Proving His Versatility
by David Loftus
[This interview first appeared in the
Roseburg, Ore., News-Review on June 3, 1990.]
Jeff Daniels is a bigger, more solid man than his previous roles might have led one to believe.
As the sweet but vacillating husband of Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment; the innocent movie hero who steps of the screen, and the aspiring actor who plays him and laps up Mia Farrow's praise in The Purple Rose of Cairo; and the pleasant stockbroker taken in hand by crazy Melanie Griffith in Something Wild, Daniels always seemed agreeably average-sized.
In person, however, he turns out to be comfortably over six feet -- broad and imposing in the heavy work boots and jacket he wears for the shooting of The Grand Tour, a science fiction adventure filming this week in Oakland, Oregon.
Actor Jeff Daniels, photo by Mike Anderson
courtesy of the News-Review
Also in contrast to his most familiar, clean-shaven roles, he sports a week's worth of facial hair growth that heightens the rugged, mountain-man look. This disparity is mentioned to him during camera adjustments.
"It all depends on what you score big in first," he said. "I scored big in Terms of Endearment. Flap (the husband) was weak, browbeaten a little bit. I still got good roles after that, but they tended to come from the Dick Van Dyke-Jack Lemmon-Alan Arkin school of weak men."
Daniels said if his first notable role had been in an adventure such as Die Hard, then "I'd get Die Hards for 10 years."
Not that he chafes at the fact that a decade of film acting in 14 features has been mostly comedies.
"It's a joy to come to work. Comedies, you can make people laugh on the set, then again when you stand at the back of the mall (cinema) and watch the movie."
Besides, his big build may eventually land him a macho role and allow him to surprise everybody with "what the critics love to call range," he said drily.
Recent assignments have enabled him to move in that direction. His next film, due out this summer, is Arachnophobia, with John Goodman and a South American bird-eating spider as co-stars. According to publicity, the movie promises to do for spiders what Jaws did for sharks.
Daniels does battle with a horde of deadly arachnids to protect hearth and kin. "I hear it's pretty good," he said, "much funnier and more frightening than we thought."
The Grand Tour also includes more action and special effects, though with the attention to character that Daniels favors.
He plays Ben Wilson, a widower with a weight on his shoulders. In a prologue, his wife is killed in an accident for which he feels partly responsible.
Wilson brings his 10-year-old daughter Hillary to Greenglen, Ohio to run a Victorian inn. Oakland appears as Greenglen, and the Shelton-McMurphey House in Eugene plays the bed-and-breakfast establishment.
Among the first visitors to the inn is a group of 10 individuals who turn out to be time travelers from the distant future on a tour of 20th century disasters.
It is up to Wilson to save the town, which involves a little time travel of his own, arguing with his double and bailing him out of jail, and perhaps even changing his more distant past.
According to writer-director David Twohy, the story is based on a novella from the 1940s "Golden Age" of science fiction called Vintage Season, by the husband-and-wife team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.
Attempts have been made to film it before but "nobody could really crack it," Twohy said, because it basically ends with the disaster: a meteor strike. "The novella seemed to be accepting fate."
The entire second half of The Grand Tour, involving Ben Wilson's redemption, is Twohy's original work.
"He's got integrity," the director said of his star. "He understands this story the way I do, and that's with our hearts, not with our minds. And he doesn't have a typical star ego. Doesn't mind working in his underpants, which I've asked him to do a couple times," Twohy said with a chuckle.
Daniels started acting in the theater. As Jed in three different productions of Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July, he won a Drama Desk nomination for Best Supporting Actor. For a Circle Repertory Theater production of Johnny Got His Gun, Daniels took home an Obie Award.
He said he is not eager to pursue further work on the stage.
"I was in New York 10 years, on Broadway and off Broadway. That's a long time. I just enjoy film acting a lot more.
"One of the big keys to acting is making it look real, like it's happening for the first time."
That's harder to do after months of rehearsals and weeks of performances, Daniels said. He enjoys the surprises and spontaneity of film work -- "the happy accidents that so often end up in the film."
Motion pictures do not encompass his life, however. He, his wife and two children ("young -- I don't talk about them," he said with an admonitory smile) live in Michigan, where he grew up.
"I love not being in Hollywood or New York. Living in Michigan, you can sit for six months straight. People in Hollywood say, 'God, you're so brave to do that, I wish I could do that,' and I say, 'Yeah, you can't go to people's premieres.'
"I write a lot. I play guitar and I've written about 200 songs. It's a hobby. I got a few acoustics (guitars), and I got a Fender (electric guitar) in the trailer. I bought a tape: Lonnie Mack's teaching me how to play the blues," he said, laughing.
Daniels also plays a lot of golf, which he said is an excellent game for a film actor whose work requires travel to various locations. "If you take your clubs and do the work which the game demands, you can play on the finest courses in the world. It really is a great game: chess on grass."
The actor is in the process of building a 125-seat theater in Michigan with the hope of creating a regional theater company that would produce a play a year and showcase new plays by Midwestern writers, perhaps even his own.
"It used to store Buicks," he said of the structure. Pointing to the Oakland Trader, a corrugated-iron barn where the current scene is being shot, he said, "It's this building plus another floor underneath, about 6,000 square feet."
Currently being renovated, the place should be ready to start in November or December, he said.
Did he have any ideas for the first show? "No, we're still trying to decide on the color of the seats."
Asked what he would have done if he had not been able to make his living as an actor, Daniels said he was all ready to go into teaching.
"I fully expected to fail in New York. Year after year, I never got a big break but I got a lot of little breaks. I'd get a commercial now and then, and I waited for a bad two-year period."
Then came Terms of Endearment. If it hadn't been for that, he said he would probably have taught English and drama, and tried to start a community theater.
Why does he act?
"It's what I do. I kind of fell on the stage in high school. I could make people laugh, I never got stage fright. I learned how to handle an audience and someone who believed in me kept giving me big roles."
[ The film Daniels was working on at the time of this interview,
which also featured Ariana Richards,
went straight to video as
"Disaster in Time" and is sometimes identified as "Timescape." ]
Go to article about the various members of a film crew
Go to feature on what it's like to be a film extra