Jeff Daniels: World-renowned actor and musician

Photography: Sam Jones

Markos Papadatos interviews Jeff Daniels, World-renowned actor and musician

Emmy award-winning actor Jeff Daniels (“The Newsroom” and “Godless”) chatted about his upcoming solo concert on October 23rd at  Cafe Wha? in New York City.

“The important thing in life is not victory but combat; it is not to have vanquished but to have fought well,” said Pierre de Coubertin, French Educator who was primarily responsible for the revival of the Olympic Games in 1894. This quote applies to actor, playwright, and musician Jeff Daniels.

Throughout his illustrious career in the entertainment industry, Daniels has earned two Primetime Emmy Awards, five Golden Globe nominations, and three Tony nominations.

On his forthcoming solo show at Cafe Wha? in Manhattan, he said, “I really am excited! I’ve never played there. I’ve been doing this for about 25 years, and I really enjoy the creative control.”

“This show is just me solo; getting to play at Café Wha is like playing in a living room. I tell stories, and I make you laugh,” he said.

“I drop in songs you’ve never heard, but they relate to people. It’s like short stories that all end in a song. I make sure the audience gets entertained, and it’s a lot of storytelling. That’s what it is,” he explained.

“It is reminiscent of the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, where all those guys played in the ‘60s. They started there, so it’s a bucket list thing for me,” he added.

On his music and songwriting inspirations, Daniels shared, “I have this need to continue to create. With movies and theater, you’ve got to wait for the phone to ring. You’ve got to wait to be wanted.”

“In the entertainment world, they want you to be creative now, or when they’re ready for you,” he noted.

“Sometimes it can be a lot of time waiting for that call, and it certainly was when I started writing songs and playing in the ’70s, you know, all the way through until now,” he elaborated.

“So, the inspiration is always there. Even though I’m not asked to be an actor, I can keep that creative and artistic side of myself going,” he said.

“Whether it’s writing plays for my theater company in Michigan, or working on the guitar, working on the set, working on the next song, and building that one-man show that I’ve got when I walk out on stage with a guitar,” he explained.

On being a part of “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” Daniels said, “I did Kelly’s show. I did my song ‘When My Fingers Find Your Strings’ and I will tell this story in my set about what happened that day.”

“Most of the time when actors volunteer to play a song on a talk show, they get told to stay in their lane but Kelly’s show was the opposite. They wanted me to play something. So, I will tell this whole behind-the-scenes story, and how nice Kelly was,” he elaborated.

“As nice as Kelly is on her show, that’s who she is off-camera as well,” Daniels said, complimenting Kelly Clarkson.

On being an artist in the digital age, at a time when streaming, technology, and social media are so prevalent, Daniels said, “Well, in the Kelly Clarkson case, I played, and people were so stunned that I even know which end of the guitar to hold up, and where to put my hands.”

“I mean, they expected absolutely nothing. The fact was that I played well, and thankfully, the video clip went viral,” he admitted.

“Six months later, Kelly covered the song. She opened her show with my song, and it was great to hear her singing it. So, that was a thrill for me,” he added.

Daniels’ musical influences are highly eclectic, and they include such iconic artists as Arlo Guthrie, Steve Goodman, Utah Phillips and the late but great John Prine.

“John Prine was one of the great storytellers,” Daniels said. “John just happened to have a guitar in his hand. When John Prine writes a song, you know that Prine wrote that song.”

“That’s what every artist is trying to do when they write something… to have that singular vision, and John Prine had it,” he said. “I kind of discovered them all at about the same time in the ‘70s.”

“Stevie Goodman had it. Arlo Guthrie had it. Christine Lavin had it, and Cheryl Wheeler all had that singular vision,” he said. “The same holds true for Guy Clark and Steve Earle.”

Back in August of 2018, Daniels, his son, Ben, and the Ben Daniels Band performed at City Winery in New York City.

“That was fun,” he recalled. “I had my son’s band with me.”

At that 2018 show, they performed The Monkees classic “Last Train to Clarksville.” “I did that song with the Ben Daniels Band. We turned it into an up-tempo bluegrass tune,” he said.

On his future plans, Daniels shared, “I’m doing a lot of gigs. After Cafe Wha? on October 23rd, I’m going to go out and play the Midwest.”

“I’ve played music live for years. I’ve played at opera houses and 200 to 300-seaters. They’re fun. They’re like playing living rooms,” he said.

“When you go to a place like the Grand Opera House in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, it’s like a Broadway theater. The people of the community take such pride in that venue,” he noted.

“There are some beautiful venues in this country, and I love going out and playing them,” he exclaimed.

“That’s what I’ll be doing in the short term,” he said. “There are a couple things in the works. One is in development and I’m hoping it happens.”

For his powerful performance as the nefarious Frank Griffin, the menacing outlaw who terrorizes the West, he won a Primetime Emmy Award for “Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie.”

On being a part of the multi-Emmy award-winning western drama series “Godless,” he said, “‘Godless’ was a good one! Scott Frank wrote and directed that series. Scott is the real deal. When he called me and said, ‘I want you to play this guy, I think you can do it.”

“Scott is the kind of guy that sees something I could do (but haven’t done yet) and he rolls the dice on me. I was really happy to come through for him because he’s a great writer and director,” Daniels elaborated.

“I just love a good western, and Scott Frank knows how to write them too,” he added.

On his career-defining moments, Daniels remarked, “A turning point was starring in not one but two leading roles in Woody Allen’s ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’ in 1985. That was Woody at the height of his filmmaking. When I got that role and then read the script and I realized that I’m playing two people.”

“Working with Woody was an honor; it was a thrill,” he noted. “I told myself, ‘Okay, I think it’s safe to say that you’re going to be able to at least make a living in this business.’ That was the case after I did that movie.”

For young and aspiring artists, actors and singers, Daniels said, “Oh, man. It’s so different now with digital and social media. People audition on their phones and via video. I don’t know how to maneuver through that or how to navigate that.”

“I didn’t do that. I had to move to New York, get an answering service, then show up in Times Square, and audition for somebody. It was different back then,” he recalled.

“I think you need to really want it. You’ve got to know that this is what you’re supposed to do. It may not work out, but you’ve got to chase it,” he said.

“You’ve got to chase it hard. You can’t quit easily. You know, I remember I went to New York at 21,” he recalled.

“I told myself that if I can last a year, ‘I’ll be okay.’ Then, when I lasted a year, I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to give it five years.’ Then, at 25, I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to give it till I’m 30’ and if I’m not making a movie by then, I was going to quit,” he expanded.

“I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life chasing something that nobody else thinks I’m good at,” he acknowledged.

“I picked up enough good people who thought I was good along the way. That’s what you need to do. You’ve got to go to New York or go chase the dream,” he said.

“If you’re the only one who believes in you, then you need one other person, and then you need another person after that,” he noted.

Daniels continued, “In my case, it was casting director Juliet Taylor who said, ‘this kid is good; we just haven’t found the right thing for him yet.’ It gathers steam, and then you suddenly are standing on a set with Woody Allen.”

“Then, you’re going, ‘I think I had to go a long way to get here, but Woody thinks I’m good’,” he admitted.

“That just makes you go, ‘all right, I’m going to stay in the game’,” he added.

Regarding the key to longevity in the entertainment industry all of these decades, Daniels said, “Never lose what got you here. Fame is like heroin. It can just screw you up, if you let it.”

“That was one of the reasons I moved to Michigan… whatever talent I had, wherever that came from, I didn’t want it to change because I was famous or in a movie that was a huge hit,” he noted.

“So, if you just hang on to what it is you do and how you do it, you need to learn new things along the way because you don’t know everything. You’ve got to learn as you go, and you can learn from people who are better than you,” he elaborated.

“If they’re better than you, study what they’re doing and figure out what they’re doing,” he said. “Then, steal from them. You will improve yourself over time.”

“If you auditioned for something and didn’t get the role but if you are continually good, then you will get called back by that casting director,” he said.

“So, you need to always be good, which means be prepared, and that means you probably need to outwork everybody else sitting in the waiting room who also wants that role,” he explained.

“There is no easy way to do it, except if you’ve got the dream and you’ve got enough talent, now you’ve got to outwork everybody else,” he added.

On the title of the current chapter of his life, Daniels revealed, “Gigging.”

If he were to have any superpower, it would be to write a song or a play (for his theater company) and be able to write a first draft in four minutes.

“It just doesn’t work that way,” he admitted. “You’ve got to slug it out for like two or three months, and then it’s garbage and now you’ve got to fix it. Maybe that’s the problem with AI, where people think that AI will solve all that. I doubt it, but I’m just an old school guy.”

“I will sit there with the keyboard in front of me and go on a blank page and go, ‘all right, get them talking.’ So, the superpower would be ‘to shoot,’ and suddenly there’s a first draft that I can rewrite,” he elaborated.

On his favorite mottos to live by, Daniels stated, “My dad told me a long time ago to invest in myself. Whatever that means to you, or what you don’t know about the guitar today, learn, so you can play it tomorrow.”

“As an artist, just continue to invest in yourself. Get better and take chances,” he said.

“Do things that risk failure. I will take on a role because I don’t know how to do it. I will say ‘yes’ and then figure out how to do it with no clue. ‘Godless’ was a prime example of that,” he elaborated.

On his definition of the word success, Daniels said, “Success means that the dreams come true, and only you know when that is! I was doing ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ on Broadway in 2019, and at that point, I had been an actor for 44 years. That was 44 years from moving to New York.”

“I had done a lot such as ‘The Newsroom,’ TV, movies and Broadway. I had done countless films. I got done with that year-long run as Atticus Finch on Broadway,” he said.

“I remember my agent calling me up afterwards and asking me ‘what do you feel like doing?’ I said, ‘well, what’s out there? What can we get?’ He goes, ‘no, what do you want to do?’ That was the first time I had ever heard him say that,” he elaborated.

“That was when I knew I had made it,” Daniels underscored. “I had crossed a finish line of my own making it at that point. I went ‘okay, I did it’.”

“The dream came true. I did everything I wanted to do. I can do more if I want, but if it stopped now, I would be okay, and that was the moment I felt successful,” he acknowledged.

For his fans and supporters, Daniels expressed, “Thanks for hanging in. I hope that whatever I do surprises you.”

Daniels remarked about his upcoming Cafe Wha? show, “When I play Cafe Wha? on October 23rd, I’m going to entertain you. I’m going to make you laugh, and I will make you cry.”

“God knows we could all use a laugh right now with the state of things, and that’s what I provide. I’m an exit ramp for you for an hour and a half,” he noted.

“I promise it will be a good night out. I promise I won’t be bad. I promise the fans will have a good time,” he concluded.

To learn more about Jeff Daniels, visit his IMDb page and his official website, and follow him on Instagram.

Photography: Luc Daniels