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Actor Jeff Daniels had a lead role in Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom TV series. But before Daniels was recruited, Sorkin doubted the actor’s ability to portray the character the showrunner had in mind.
This led to Daniels going to extreme lengths to secure his part.
Jeff Daniels once credited ‘The Newsroom’ for saving his career
In 2012, Sorkin returned to the world of television with his HBO series The Newsroom. Unlike Sorkin’s The West Wing, which focused on politics, Newsroom had a cable news network at the center of its story. Daniels played editor and anchor Will McAvoy who managed the fictional News Night television program. He was surrounded by a cast of other well-known actors like Emily Mortimer, Alison Pill and Olivia Munn.
The Will McAvoy role was right up Daniels’ alley at the time. Although he’d already established an iconic film career for himself, he was looking for a gateway into the small screen.
“Especially on the cable side,” he said in an interview with AV Club. “Every actor just wants good writing. Give me good writing, and I’ll play it all day. So it had been about a year of looking, trying to find the right thing, being picky, and then Aaron came along. And that was just… I just dropped everything and said, ‘What do I have to do to get this?’”
Daniels’ instincts about the television series was right. Will McAvoy ended up becoming one of Daniels’ most noteworthy roles. Through the character, Daniels also reached a career high by delivering a memorable speech about America’s shortcomings. It was the type of dialogue Daniels felt he’d been waiting almost his entire career to deliver.
“I worked my ass off on it,” Daniels told GQ. “First take, I hit it out of the park. I know that because Aaron walked over to me after take one and he goes, ‘OK, you’re pitching a no-hitter. I’m not going to talk to you.’ And he walked away. That was great. Then I knew I had a role. I pretty much — with Aaron’s help — saved my career.”
Jeff Daniels slammed Aaron Sorkin into a table for his role in ‘The Newsroom’
Daniels’ performance as Will McAvoy may have garnered high praise for critics. But initially, Sorkin wasn’t sold that the Dumb and Dumber star would’ve been able to do the role justice. The two ended up meeting for dinner, where Daniels wanted to show Sorkin he was the right actor for the job.
“I had to have a meeting with him at a hotel here in New York to convince him that I could be angry and I tried, you know, raising my voice, being rude to the waiter and I tried all these different things and I could tell he wasn’t buying it,” Daniels once said on The Tonight Show with jimmy Fallon (via Contact Music).
With Sorkin remaining unconvinced, Daniels decided to attack the writer to get his point across.
“So at some point I just said, ‘Aaron’, and I reached across and I placed my hand on his head…I’m gonna do this to Jimmy and it’s not going to hurt. I promise. And I took Aaron’s head and I slammed it down into the table and he bounced back up and then I had the role,” Daniels recalled.
Why Jeff Daniels considered ‘The Newsroom’ a lot of work
Daniels has often shared that he had a good time working on The Newsroom for the show’s three seasons. But he admitted that getting accustomed to the schedule of a television program was something he needed to get used to. Which was why Daniels figured his time as Will McAvoy came to a proper end after being the character for three years.
“I enjoyed it. But it was a lot of work,” Daniels said in a 2014 interview with Esquire. “There’s a lot of dialogue and then there’s the pace. And there’s no ad-libbing. And that’s fine. That’s what we do on Broadway. But that takes a lot of time. So your weekends and your nights are spent memorizing endlessly to stay ahead of it. You can’t go to the set and sort of know it. You won’t make the corner. You’ll go off the cliff. So the work of it all, I’m glad we did it. It was a huge challenge, but three years of that is plenty. You don’t want to deteriorate.”
