20 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
1
CHARACTERSTUDIES
LIKEAT TICUS
T
he actor Jeff Daniels recently re-
turned to his pied-à-terre in Man-
hattan after a long pandemic absence.
“It’s a little like walking into a dead per-
son’s apartment,” he said the other day
over Zoom. “Except you’re the one who’s
dead.” Daniels was lounging on a rum-
pled couch in a purple T-shirt he hadn’t
seen since 2019, his fingers hovering
over the strings of a Martin acoustic
guitar. A pair of round rimless specta-
cles slid down his nose.
Like millions of people last year, Dan-
iels had been barred from his workplaces,
which included Broadway, for “To Kill
a Mockingbird” (he stars as Atticus
Finch), and the set of a new Showtime
series, “American Rust.” The series re-
sumed shooting this past March, in west-
ern Pennsylvania, and wrapped in Au-
gust, and Daniels came back to New
York in September for a month of re-
hearsals for “Mockingbird,” which starts
up again this week. “It’s an interesting
‘Who’s playing?’ And I would say, ‘Oh,
Grandma, it’s the Knicks and the Char-
lotte Hornets.’ And she’d say, ‘Well, who’s
got the most Blacks?’ I’d say the Knicks,
and that’s the team she would go for.
And it was odd, because there was noth-
ing of hate in her anywhere. She was
just rooting for Blacks to be O.K., and
I understand that now.”
Wilmington, North Carolina, 2021:
The New Hanover County Commu-
nity Remembrance Project has made
contact with relatives of three of the
eight known victims. A memorial cer-
emony is planned for November 6th.
(A GoFundMe campaign supporting
the event has raised close to six thou-
sand dollars.) Nate Brown will be there,
accompanied by members of his fam-
ily. “A lot of people want to go,” he says.
“We’ve talked about taking an R.V.” He
continues, “I realize now that I play a
part in what Tim Pinnick and others
are doing down there. What I have that
they don’t have is the DNA.”
—Lauren Collins
little exercise, returning to something
that you’d been doing for a year, and
then you had two years off,” he said. He
jumped up and went into another room
to grab a different guitar, a modified 1934
C-2 Archtop that Martin later made
into a custom edition named after Dan-
iels. “This,” he said, stroking the gleam-
ing wood.
Guitar playing helped Daniels get
through the pandemic and the Presi-
dential election, as well as some earlier
bouts of anxiety. He first started play-
ing after he moved to New York, in 1976,
when he spent many nights alone, writ-
ing songs in his apartment at Seventh
Avenue and Twenty-third Street. He
was largely self-taught, and eventually
started performing in midsize clubs.
“With the blues, you can sound good
really fast,” he said. He brushed his fin-
gers over the strings and produced a
loud twang. “You can just do that and
everybody thinks you’re a genius.”
During the lockdown, he held sev-
enty-two live-stream performances from
his primary home, in Chelsea, Michi-
gan, where he grew up and where he
now lives with his wife and two Aus-
tralian shepherds, Magglio and Scout.
He performed his own pieces and cov-
ers of his favorite folk and blues tracks,
for venues that were shuttered by the
pandemic. His two sons worked the
audio and camera. Last October, he
began putting together an album based
on his pandemic streams, called “Alive
and Well Enough.” “I needed one big
song at the end, and I really wanted to
deal with what was going on, going into
the election,” he said. He recruited the
Detroit blues singer Thornetta Davis to
help write and sing “I Am America,” a
gently demanding civil-rights ballad.
“This is not just a song—this is a prayer,”
he told Davis. “This is a plea, from you.
From people of color. To, you know,
‘hear my voice.’”
Daniels can sometimes seem to in-
habit his characters offstage—like a re-
verse Method actor. Some of Daniels’s
roles have explored a particular theme:
why the country is so polarized that
millions of people voted for Donald
Trump. In 2012, as the moralizing news
anchor Will McAvoy on HBO’s “The
Newsroom,” his rant about the demise
of American greatness—intended as
a call for sanity—eerily presaged theMAGA campaign. Last year, Daniels
played James Comey in “The Comey
Rule,” on Showtime, which plumbed
the former F.B.I. director’s attempt to
stand up to Trump. In “American Rust,”
based on Philipp Meyer’s novel, Dan-
iels stars as Del Harris, the police chief
of a small town in Fayette County, Penn-
sylvania, where the landscape is littered
with idle steel plants and the locals
struggle with eviction, violence, and
general hopelessness. “These people, if
they aren’t at the bottom, they can see
it from where they are,” Daniels said.
“And that’s not just south Pennsylva-
nia. All over the country there are peo-
ple like that. And a lot of ’em are white,
you know?”
He went on, starting to channel At-
ticus Finch, “I grew up in a white town,
in a white atmosphere with a white ed-
ucation and all that stuff. I know these
guys. I am one of these guys.” When he
heard about Meyer’s book, Daniels kept
it in the back of his mind, waiting for
the right moment. “When I could ac-
tually get something made, I said, ‘Let’s
try to get “American Rust” made—I
think I can nail that guy,’” he said.
After a few more songs, including
his minor hit “Trumpty Dumpty Blues,”
Daniels put the guitar away. It was time
to take out Magglio and Scout. Dan-
iels insists on walking them himself.
“That’s part of the glamour, to be a fa-
mous actor in Central Park with a plas-
tic bag of—you know, bending over to
get it out of the Central Park grass,” he
said. He sighed as he prepared to get
up. “I hope they poop.”
—Sheelah KolhatkarJeff Daniels