If you’re looking for words to define Jeff Daniels’ performance in the new Netflix drama A Man in Full, “big” might be an obvious one. “Even the Southern accent is larger than life,” he tells Consequence. “The accent is so thick. So I was basically given permission to go big and to go all the way with him. Regina King and Tommy Schlamme, the directors, they encouraged that.”
King and Schlamme share directing duties on the limited series, based on the book by literary icon Tom Wolfe and adapted by David E. Kelley, while Daniels plays Charlie Croker, an Atlanta business tycoon. Charlie’s unexpected bankruptcy makes him a target for enemies who have been waiting for their chance to take him down — Charlie, though, has made a life and career out of fighting on.
Getting inside Charlie’s head wasn’t hard, Daniels explains, because of Wolfe’s original book: “His writing is so detailed — the character descriptions are just, I mean, you’re just taking notes. That accent was a lot of fun to pull up because Tom Wolfe described this accent that Charlie had as, ‘There are times when he gets angry or frustrated and you can’t even understand what he’s saying.’ So Tom did a lot of the work for me.”
From there, it was a matter of “understanding that he’s larger than life, that he is the star of his own show, and everybody he meets is his audience. And he assumes that they love him almost as much as he loves himself. To have that big, bloated man’s man of a male ego parading around like a peacock is certainly not where the country and the culture is now. But it was great fun.”
The fun wasn’t only in playing Charlie at the height of his powers, though — Daniels also enjoyed the idea of Charlie’s ego being “like a big balloon and then you poke a hole in him, and for six episodes he just disintegrates.”
Key to Charlie’s downfall are the people surrounding him, including his ex-wife (Diane Lane) and ruthless business opponents, played by Bill Camp and Tom Pelphrey. “I was surrounded by a great cast of actors who also saw what I was doing and said, ‘Okay, better jump on that train,'” Daniels says. And so everybody kind of ratcheted it up and that was fun.”
In particular, he continues, “Bill Camp and Tom Pelphrey, they went big with me. We just fed off each other. You know, half of your performance is in the other actor. And when you’ve got people like Bill and Tom giving it back to you, they’re doing half the work for you. So it’s a matter of plugging into them and then letting it all happen in front of the camera.”
While Daniels began his career starring in notable films like Terms of Endearment and Dumb and Dumber, the last 10 years have seen him focus more on TV projects. This, he says, is because “I’ve been chasing good writing — because when you’ve got Aaron Sorkin writing The Newsroom, Scott Frank writing Godless, Danny Derman, Adam Rapp writing The Looming Tower, and then David E. Kelley… The streamers, that’s where the writers went, and the writers were given free reign to go further, do more.”
The biggest difference Daniels finds is that “on television, you’ve got to hit it on take one or take two, because of time. You don’t get 10 takes to warm up and learn your lines. You kind of gotta hit it on take one, which I enjoy. And when you’ve worked with Clint Eastwood, like I have, he only shoots one take. So I understood what that meant.”
As Daniels adds, “The movies are terrific and wonderful, and I did them, a lot of them. But this isn’t network television where you’re restricted, so I loved it. And when you’re shooting a novel in our case, literally, you get to do more and the writers get to write more. I’ve loved being on the streamers and Netflix, and I think it’s been a great boon to my career. It kept me in the business, to be honest.”
A Man in Full is streaming now on Netflix.
