"Jeff Daniels"

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The days are getting shorter

Am I losing my mind?

Or are they losing their minds?

Or are we all losing our...

Oh my god

I was supposed to do the...

Hey, welcome to SmartLess

SmartLess

Thank you. Oh, my God.
I was supposed to do the... Hey, welcome to Smartless.

Smart.

Smart.

Smart.

Smart.

Smart.

Smart.

Listener, Sean's got a walking boot on. He's got a booty.
He's got a booty. Now I got a foot boot.
Oh, Sean, you've been saying for a while you wanted to get some booty, and that is just great. I got a foot boot on.
What happened? You know, I don't have to wear it, but the doctor said if you want to heal fast, you should wear it. I have a tiny, tiny, tiny torn thing in my third toe on my right foot.
I think what we're really looking for is how did we hurt the toe? I don't know. Hang on, wait a second.
Working out maybe a little bit? Let's pause for one fucking second. That entire boot that goes halfway up your leg is because you have a tiny torn thing in your third toe? It's for one little piggy.
Why, is that the one that didn't go to market? What happened? It refused to go to market? Yeah, what happened, Sean? What happened to the toe? No, I don't know I swear to god you know you know when you walk and you your front party or the ball of your foot turns up I was doing it too much I guess I would walk too much oh is that what it is so you've got an exercise injury is that what it is from walking if anyone would have an exercise injury it's the it's the tight silhouette of Will Arnett yeah look at that yeah you when Jason was, you both were out at the house recently when we were all on the East Coast and Jason got to see you firsthand. I don't think he believed me that I worked that hard because he's kind of the guy who runs six miles every day and we know that he's the guy who puts the road work in.
And then he got to see firsthand that I'm actually doing it, right, Jay? Yeah, well, here's what it is. Oh, boy.
Okay, there's a basement. I'm trying to fucking cue you up to compliment me.
No, I'm done with it. Now we're going to switch it.
We're going to balance it right now. Listener, there's a basement room in Will Arnett's fabulous second summer home because of your kind listening.
It's my first summer home, but it's my second home, yeah.

Your kind listening has given him the means to provide.

Not true.

I've had that before.

I've had it for years.

That's true.

All right.

So now you're working on a third, right?

Let them know how rich you are, Will.

They love that.

Yeah.

Shut up.

Trying to be relatable.

So he's got a basement slash gym in the bottom of the house, and it's all white.

There's some wood panel walls, but it's white. First of all, that's not true.
The floor is leather. That's true.
Let me get to the white part. The white part is the standing punching bag, okay? It's real, real white.
It's hot white. I saw that heavy bag.
And the biggest violation are the white boxing gloves and the white tennis shoes that are down there just for the boxing sessions so he's getting he's getting skinny while doing it in miami style i suppose it's pretty good i jason when i was there will show me that too and he actually demonstrated so i had to stand there and watch him box for a little bit yeah But it was impressive. Thank you.
But then this is what I like.

Jason FaceTimed me from that

same gym running on the

treadmill. Running on the treadmill.
That's true.

Jason, when I got down there, like I said

the floor is leather. I don't get in, I don't

want to get into the whole thing. Oh, you've got an Italian

leather floor. But the point is

Is it really leather? Sure.

Every time I come down there, I would come down

there and Jason would be running. It would be a

spray, like somebody had

just, you know, Jason would be running. It would be a spray.
Like somebody had just put pressure on the end of a garden hose and just sprayed the amount of sweat that was surrounding the treadmill. Yeah, you sweat a lot.
Yeah. Well, and then what did I do? I take my towel.
You did what? And I mop it all up. I wipe down the machine like a guy who spent some time in a public gym.
You know, just courteous. Hey, listen, mystery guest, you can't participate yet.
God damn it. Okay, let's get to it because he's laughing.
I'm still in the thing that everything is white. Oh, are you kidding? No, wait, wait, let's guess.
Let's guess right there off of that. Oh, God.
He's an actor. He's an actor's actor.
He's from Michigan. He yelled, he yelled.
He's comedic. Wait, he's from Michigan.
He still lives there. He made his film debut in Ragtime, and instead of listing his credits, because I've just heard of him, you're going to guess who it is.
Let's ask him about his credits. It's the incredibly gifted and talented, one of my personal all-time favorite actors of all time, one of the good guys.
It's Jeff Daniels. Hello, how are you? Fantastic.
That's a booking, everybody. Let me ask you about the punching bag.
Yeah, a good workout, but psychologically, emotionally, are we dealing with some shit when we're doing that? First, yes. Yeah.
Yes, I have a lot of issues that I'm trying to work out right now. Sure.
Jeff Daniels, thank you for being on today. I really am such a gigantic fan, as I'm sure I can speak for all of us.
Gigantic fan. Now, you live in Michigan.
Not that Michigan isn't awesome. One of my best friends lived there.
Well, you know Raina. She lives in Lakeside, Michigan.
I didn't know that. But it's unusual for actors to live there, right? You hear this all the time.
Why Michigan? And why didn't you ever want to leave? I did leave. Left for about 10 years.
New York City. Great research, Sean.
And Kathleen, my wife, my wife is from there. We're from the same town.
Oh, that's nice. we were in New York City for 10 years.
We had a two-year-old boy. I had about three or four movies at that point, but had no faith that the career would last whatsoever.
They don't, right? No. So I didn't want to be somewhere where I get the phone call that you're over.
Right. And I had heard that.
My agent had said that once. I said, you know, somebody is going to be in the, do you think so-and-so is a good actor? He goes, no, no, he's over.
So I've been told more than once by one of my reps that, you know, let's start thinking about something else. I've seen people tell you that after a take, Jason.
That's true. And I've whispered it to myself in the mirror a few times.
Jeff, sorry, continue. No, and that's so, you know, being fatalistic, I went back to Michigan.
We built a house for a lot less money than L.A. or New York, and had another kid and kind of used the Detroit airport to commute, which was unusual.
But I just, uh, I didn't know how to raise my kids in LA or in Hollywood specifically. You know, the joke is I just didn't want them to grow up going to Sly Stallone's house for an Easter egg hunt.

Why not?

I didn't know how to pull them out of that.

So I said, why don't we just go home?

And so when the career's over, I can go, oh, okay,

and I'll hang up and I'll already be home.

Yeah, that was the long-term plan.

Hey, Jeff, tell the kids the Easter bunny's fucking late today.

You know, there's this thing that I heard a long time ago. I might not be getting this right, but somebody told me this.
This is an actor's career summed up. You may have heard this.
I'll use my name for example. Who is Sean Hayes? Get me Sean Hayes.
Get me a Sean Hayes type. Who is Sean Hayes? That's the trajectory of an actor's career.
Is there a young Sean Hayes in there too? Because that happens. Sure, yeah.
That happens too. Him, but younger.
But Jeff, you have always been a couple of steps ahead in your choices, in your perception of things. I mean, you've been a pro for so long.
And I wonder if not sort of being able to step back to go and work and then be able to not live in this. I also didn't want my kids to grow up in Hollywood, which is why I moved to Beverly Hills.
But the point is, I think that maybe was there, but do you get to have that kind of, Hampton's for the summer though. And Hampton's for the summer.
Yeah, I'm not an animal, Jason. Yeah, got it.
But do you get to have that kind of race? We had a Formula One driver, Daniel Ricciardo, on, and he talked about needing to take that step back and get that perspective. And do you feel like being in Michigan, you get to have more perspective, and that helps you do what you do? Does that kind of recharge your batteries a little bit? A couple things, yeah.
The recharge happens. You know, the movie or the TV show ends and you're still in that town.
And other people are working, just not you. That would have been harder.
When I did have, like, time off back in Michigan and then would get a job, and you're going to shoot at Warner Brothers, you'd walk on Warner Brothers, and it's exciting. And that enthusiasm that you had as a kid for not making a film, but for making a movie.
I'm making movies. And it kept that kind of wonderment of when i first got into the business of you know you go to soundstage whatever and there's a plaque that says streetcar named desire was shot in this one that i get off on stuff like that so it brought all that back um it also made me different jack lemon i saw him you know we ran into him and i asked him about acting and all.
He goes, you got to be different, kid. You got to be different than the other 25 guys sitting outside that door.
Michigan made me different. That's cool.
And where does it all sit for you today as far as your passion and your investment in emotional investment into the future?

Because you've done it.

I mean, you've got the gold medal for longevity.

You've got the gold medal for longevity. You've got the gold medal for quality.
You've got the gold medal for providing, et cetera, et cetera. So do you find yourself in a place of sort of that thing, Will's tired of hearing me say that sort of that sexy indifference that allows for you to be really hireable because they can smell this kind of, well, he doesn't need it.
He's done it. How does it all sit for you now? What do you want to do? That's the question.
And that's, you know, I've often, you know, and you guys, when do you know you've made it? Is it money? Is it roles? Is it an Oscar? What is it? And I've never been able to answer that. And one of those things was that question when my agent, I said, well, what's next year? I'm looking at next year.
He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's some things, but what do you want to do? And I've never been in a position to do that. Not until Newsroom and then String and a Map.
I mean, Newsroom bought me 10 years. You were so amazing in that show.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Not even Dumb and Dumber.
Dumb and Dumber didn't give you that position. I would have thought that you've always been in that position because you seem like, maybe this is a testament to what a great actor you are.
You seem like you sort of, the roles that you play and the stuff that you do kind of feels like it's by design. Yeah, because to Will's point, Terms of Endurance, Something Wild, Purple Rose of Cairo, Newsroom, Gettysburg, all these things that you've done which are just mind-blowing.
And then you have Dumb and Dumber, which to me was one of the smartest moves you could ever make because it showed immediately you did there sean with the title and everything that's a fucking classic actually you know what sean you just mentioned the one so i mean jeff we met i don't know if you remember a few years ago we we both i was on there for a couple weeks rv an rv with with uh with robin and in that whole whole gang and our buddy Barry Sonnenfeld and I remember I kept thinking like I don't want to don't talk to Jeff Daniels too much don't tell him how much you love something wild because for me that movie. And you didn't.
I didn't. I didn't and I just pretend I had because Jason just kept saying sexy and different, sexy and different so I was posing a lot and I was pursing my lip like I didn't.
And I just pretend I had, because Jason just kept saying, sexy and different, sexy and different.

So I was posing a lot and I was pursing my lips like I didn't care.

But I will say, I want to get to Something Wild.

Something Wild was the first movie I ever owned.

And I'll tell you why.

I rented it and I forgot to give it back to the video store.

This is a true story.

These are the way the compliments come from Will, Joe.

This is an absolutely true story. And I've watched that movie.
Not only have I watched it dozens and dozens of times, there's something, I reference it all the time because I love that character you played. You know, I've seen versions of it before, but this guy who's got this secret and you take it throughout the whole film and you're really funny and you seem like you're really hapless and whatever

and then it turns out there's like this whole other twist to it

and this guy's got this thing burning in him

and I've always used that as a touchstone

of a character who's got something else going on.

There's something about it that I just love.

I don't mean to embarrass you, Jeff,

but I just love that film so much.

Was that a big experience for you making that movie? It was great because of Jonathan Demme. I mean, you guys do improv brilliantly.
I've never taken an improv class in my life. And Jonathan used the script as an outline, and that was the first movie where, yeah, don't worry what they wrote.
Here's what you're, you know, say this, say this, try that, go. No way.
And that was a new territory for me. So you got the freedom, as you know, from improv to kind of go.
But I never, the secret thing is that sometimes actors will hide it a little bit, maybe a lot, but not completely.

And I think I, if I remember right, I just completely ignored the fact that there's this secret that I'm going to get to later

because I went into that movie going,

the two guys I had grown up with idolizing

or at least got me interested in acting were Dick Van Dyke and Jack Lemmon.

They were two of them. But they were the guys who could do comedy alan arkin was another one alan is so you know understated and all that but these guys you know like in in-laws with peter fox those guys they could go big comedically and not get caught yeah and and so that's jack lemon and dick van dyke had a baby and its name was charlie driggs in something wild that was i'm gonna do what they would do and then i just rode that into that secret but you you had that there's a scene in the if you remember there's a scene in the coffee shop at the motel where ray liota come ray liota at his menacingly best.
First movie. First movie.

So there you go.

First movie.

He was so scary.

I bet he was scary even just doing the scenes with.

He was so good.

But you have this scene where you kind of,

there's a cop in the diner there,

and you know that he can't do anything

because the cop's there.

Oh, yeah.

So you've got, like, the freedom.

And there's something, again,

about the way you played that scene.

I was like, this is the way you do a scene.

I thought, if I taught a film class, I'd go, this is how you do a scene.

And that dynamic and that chemistry and those instincts that you had,

for me, again, not to embarrass you, I've just always taken with me.

It's a strange thing, but it's true.

You don't teach?

Well, I should.

This is a good point.

It's a really good point, Sean. And I'm going to put my number up in the chat after if anybody wants to.
You could use it, Sean. I could.
That's a movie that one of my heroes, Paul Thomas Anderson, talks a lot about. And I've scolded myself for having never seen it yet.
But after this talk, I've got even more impetus to see it. Jonathan Demme, if you gave him $10,000 to make a movie or $100 million, he'd have the same enthusiasm at 6 in the morning, same thing.
And he never met an idea that he wouldn't give it a shot. Yeah, try it.
Go. Wow.
Anything. That's great.
Anything. He was so encouraging.
Others have been so, but no one more so than Jonathan Demme was. He was a pleasure to work with.
And we will be right back. HBO's biggest series, The Last of Us, returns with a new season on Max.
Starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, the show picks up five years after the events of the first season

as Joel and Ellie are drawn into conflict

with each other and a world even more dangerous

and unpredictable than the one they left

behind. CNN calls

The Last of Us exquisite, fully realized

and worthy of the hype. And the

Daily Beast calls it a riveting and

suspenseful triumph. Based on the

groundbreaking video game, the Emmy-winning HBO

original series The Last of Us premieres Sunday, April 13th, 9 p.m. on Max.
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And now back to the show. One of my favorite movies, like top five, is Ragtime.
Tell me about that. Tell me about working with Milos Forman.
Ragtime was the first movie. It um my agent had been an agent at icm for about a week yeah he inherited a client list of which i was on it one of the people on it he recently was the casting director for ragtime so paul martino was he knew milo's and he said milo's uh you know yeah i've started a and I got an actor I want you to see.
Put him in the movie. And so Milos, it was perfunctory.
I went over and met Milos. He goes, yeah, okay, and said hello and looked at me and said, okay, right, you can play this part.
Get out of here. That was it.
And I got it because of Paul. The thrill of Ragtime was Cagney, working with Jimmy Cagney.
That was his last film, wasn't it? It was, and the story, he didn't want to do it. He was living upstate New York.
He was 81 going on 101. He wanted a screen test to prove to himself that he could do it.
Wow. Milos really wanted him.
So this is 80, 81. They rented a studio at Channel 13 in New York City and WNET.
And we went down there and he got a bunch of the other actors that were in this one scene with the police commissioner, which was Cagney. They got Kenny McMillan, who's passed away.
He was amazing. He was a bulldozer fire plug of a, you know, angry actor that could just go.
I mean, he was just an open vein. The racist fire chief.
Yeah. Yeah.
And then he added, I think Howard Rollins was there, and then three or four of us other cops who were just, you know, to fill out the room, and I don't know why, but we didn't say anything. But I got to go.
Yeah you're sitting in there and there's like one camera and a black and white monitor up on a wall. That's where you could see what the camera saw.
No video village, just that, black and white. In comes Cagney, drove down.
Here he comes, a nurse is helping him in on a walker. Sound familiar with him? On a walker.
Puts the walker down, sits in the chair. It's a three-page scene.
He can't do it. He can't remember the next line.
He can't. He turns the page.
It's 10 seconds. It's bad.
Again, Will. Milos goes, all right, don't worry about it.
Let's do the one page. Let's do the one.
And he puts the one page down. There are three lines.
Can't do it. He says, oh, let's do the one.
The one line. You do the one line.
You read that line. Cagney went over it, went over it, went over it.
And then he looked up and he looked at Kenny McMillan and you could see it on the black and white TV monitor. There it was.
That thing that only guys like Cagney have. The only other guys I've seen that have it that I've been on a set with were Clint and Jack Nicholson.
That thing where the camera goes and they become that thing and then they come out of it. They make eye contact and the presence is there and yeah.
Yeah. Or just you can see all the movies he's ever done are right there again.
He's just old. And that, we cut after that one line and Milos said, perfect, you got it, we're going to be.
And he shot it line to line. Just for Tracy, Milos Forman, he directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ragtime, Amadeus, Man on the Moon, all these huge movies.
Yeah. He's a great director.
I'm so jealous you got to work with him. Amadeus is my favorite movie.
Can we go to Newsroom? Can you? Yeah, sure. Now, I think everyone except Tracy has probably heard the stories about Aaron Sorkin and his incredible writing, in sometimes his intransigence when it comes to

actors making the lines their own. Can you speak to any of that without risking any sort of career suicide? No, not at all.
It's very clear. It is very clear what the rules are, which is don't change your word.
Like, I've heard you can't change um

to uh. Correct.

Huh. How did you like

that? Uh, it's um.

It's actually um, yeah. I had come out

of the theater, so

in New York, where it was, that's the way it

was in the theater. It was, whether it was

Lanford Wilson, in my case, off Broadway,

uh, you go ask

if you want to change one of the words.

And,

so that was just the rule. And so you're

Thank you. Danford Wilson, in my case, off Broadway, you go ask if you want to change one of the words.

And so that was just the rule.

And so your job was to make the writing work.

And if they didn't work, they'd rewrite it or they'd redo you or something.

But that was the deal. But in the interest of trying to make lines sound like they are coming out of thought,

one sometimes, you know, like I'm doing right now, you sort of, you break them up, you mess them up. Oh, you're acting right now? No, but you know what I mean? Like there's like, there's things that sound natural that a writer might not write because it is a lot of ellipses and a lot of half words.
So it sounds authentic, right? Exactly. Yeah, but I'm sure his defense would be like, I know that's what makes me good at what I do is that I understand that.
And there's also the sort of underlying that is that I understand better than you. Well, but there's the separation between what is writing and what is acting.
And I guess my question is, how much is he tolerant of the merging of those two things? You have to marry yourself to the rhythm of the writing, the melody of Sorkin. There is a melody, and I call it like riding secretariat.
You get on it, and you ride it. Right, like a mammoth or even a Shakespeare.
Or Neil Simon was the same way. Don't change it.
Don't change your word. And you guys know from comedy, you take one word out, it's not funny.
I did Promises Promises on Broadway, this musical, and Neil would come to rehearsals and rewrite with me on the spot. It was crazy.
Wow. And I was like, oh my God, Neil Simon's rewriting words.
I've never worried about the fact that I get what Jason's saying completely. And I'm not advocating for one way or the other.
I'm just curious about what the process was. No, I know, I know.
But here's the deal. Like Patty Chayefsky and Network, for example.
Yeah. When William Holden and Faye Dunaway are going at each other in that room, there are three people in that room, and one of them is Patty Chayefsky.
And you know it, and you can feel it and you can hear his voice and that's that's where sorkin's coming from he is in every scene and so my job is to make it sound as thoughtful and it's falling out of my head for the first time as possible but at the end of the day if it also feels written we like that right there was some there's someone driving the bus and so you marry yourself to that as an actor and you do your best job to make it as real as possible but you know jason we talk about this sometimes there's that kind of look at the end of the day also and maybe this is more prevalent now it's it is much more a collaborative experience on set i think that i don't know if all you guys can attest to that,

but certainly there are moments where, for instance,

Jimmy Burroughs, the great TV director,

who Sean and I had the honor to work with,

and Jason's known forever and ever and ever.

And Jason, did you guys ever do any?

Did you and Jimmy ever?

Yeah, yeah, a bunch of stuff, actually.

Oh, yeah, you did a bunch.

Yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, of course. So I i remember one time sean and i were doing a show with jimmy and um i remember i can't i had got to walk in and deliver a line in there and like take a drink or something so i come in and i say the line and then i take the drink and as we're walking away to the next set to uh to go rehearse on the next set he says uh willie say half the line, take the drink.
And as we're walking away to the next set to go rehearse on the next set,

he says, Willie, say half the line, take the drink,

and then say the other thing on the other side.

And I was like, okay.

And I try it.

And it was like 24% funnier.

Yeah.

Isn't that amazing?

And I kind of was like, huh.

He just walked away.

He was like, he was so fucking right, you know?

Yeah. I love that.
Yeah, the good one, Jim Brooks is another guy like that. I mean, they just know.
They just know. But they got to see it.
They got to see you do it. And so that's kind of what I go, you want to see the words you wrote? Here they are.
Boom. And that's kind of how I go into it.
With all your experience, all your set exposure, set experience, understanding of process, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff, has it ever drawn you towards wanting to utilize all that by jumping in the director chair? You have, right, Jason? Yeah. You love it.
I can't stand it. Oh, really? God, I cannot get enough of it.
I can't stand it. Why? Because the questions, the constant questions, the coming up and going, is it the red sweater or the blue sweater? I don't care.
I just don't care. And so I completely get having the vision.
It's so true, yeah. But I don't have the patience for it.
But having the vision. It's so true, yeah.
But having the, I don't have the patience for it. Yeah.
But having the vision of the overall piece, I completely get that that's the chair you got to sit in. Right.
What about when you're on the set with a director that isn't as comfortable on a set as you are and as a result, the process, you know, the 10 hours of work you guys might have to do that day is going to take 14. And does that ever just start to eat at you? And you're like, well, if I would just utilize all that I've absorbed, we might treat ourselves to a more efficient day.
Jason got into directing so that he could do scenes, like whatever would get him back on the 10 quickest. Yeah, exactly.
And let's collapse this coverage into a, yeah. Everybody just stand in a line.
I'm going to shoot that. Is this setup going to put me on the 405? Because if it's not...
It's another one-er. Listen, you also, you underestimate Jason's appetite for discussing minutiae and arguing about fucking just details and stuff that's meaningless.
Oh, my God. He can fucking talk about shit that you're like, we already got it a half hour ago, idiot.
And he's like, but listen, why would they? You know, shut the fuck. But you know, if you think about it.
It's unreal. It's unreal.
No interest whatsoever. Here's the other problem with being a director.
I wrote, directed, and acted in two independent films. So I did it.
I got it. I've been in the editing room.
I completely get how that's where you write your final draft. All of that.
But you rap principal photography,

I'm done.

As an actor, I'm done.

You are one third of the

way through this thing.

And I just, I'm over it.

That I learned that.

I'm going, oh my God, now I gotta go promote

it?

Well, that speaks to something interesting. Jeff, do you like that?

Obviously you just said you

kind of like that, that you're rapped.

But you have such a huge

I don't know. Moat it? Yeah.
Well, that speaks to something interesting. Jeff, do you like that? Obviously, you just said you kind of like that, that you're wrapped.
But you have such a huge resume. You've done so many films and television programs, et cetera.
Do you love constantly kind of jumping into new things and going a completely different direction? Like your stuff, the breadth of your work is crazy. Yeah, it's huge.
Comedy, drama, indie, huge movies. Theater.
What is that about? It's keeping me interested, to be honest. The pandemic happened, and I was 65 when the pandemic happened.
So it really was like forced retirement without the gold watch. You're just done.
And this is what, oh, this is what retirement is like. I got it.
Okay. And then I came out of, well, in March, almost out of the pandemic, we hope, I went down to Pittsburgh, and we've just finished five months of shooting this Showtime series called American Rust.
And I was curious as to whether I'd still be in love with acting or wanted to do it. I was getting used to semi-retired and all that.
And I missed it. I missed between action and cut.
I miss, I miss even going back to Mockingbird, you know, on Broadway. I miss what Atticus Finch is going to be able to do to this post-George Floyd crowd.
Acting is a kind of thing, just for me, if I just stay focused on acting, I can take 43 years of doing it and be better than I've ever been because it's cumulative, right? We're not athletes. Our bodies don't deteriorate.
Or if they do, play your age, which is also what I'm doing. Yeah doing I'm still playing 20 to 25 thank God for Sean that's your choice Sean's deteriorating one toe at a time the market thing was funny but I'm still interested and I gotta be challenged to risk failure.
They're writing it for me, but I've never done this guy before. So I'm going to go all in on that and see if I can pull it off.
And if I do, I do. And then I keep, whatever process I got is working, and it comes from newsroom.
How do you know if you've pulled it off? Do you defer to the critics? I bet no. Is it for yourself? In other words, do you watch what you do, and when you see the final product or the dailies or playback or whatever, are you the barometer? Are you the one that decides whether you've gone outside your skill set, if you're doing too much acting, if you're staying within yourself? How do you know if you're pulling off a character it's the work ethic i had to work so hard on the first season of newsroom harder than i've ever had to work you have to memorize mountains of dialogue and then you got to spit it out at 100 miles an hour that means you have to learn it so that you can do that the Sunday night before the entire week.

You can't learn it in the makeup chair. You just can't.
I've seen day players come in on Newsroom, and they're trying to learn three pages of Sorkin in the makeup chair, and the flop sweat hits them. I mean, it's really—I've never seen it anywhere else.
And we all go through it. I went through it on episode five.
I got in and I just couldn't keep a word of it in my head anymore. The computer's overloaded.
And I literally took a knee in the middle of the newsroom and said, give me the line again. Give me the line again.
And she gave it to me three times. Couldn't say it.
They sent me home. Wow.
Oh, my God. We called it getting sorkinized.
You just hit the wall. And everybody, everybody did it.
I mean, I can go around the cast and go that day, yeah, I remember when Allison, I remember when Tommy did, all of us. So I knew the amount of work that I had to put in to pull off Will McAvoy every fucking day.
I'd love to see Jason do that because Jason's memorization is... Yeah, Jason's crazy memorized.
I think I'm good, but Jason's is the best of all time. But you know what, though? I think that would be my kryptonite, though.
I wonder if I'd be any good at that. To memorize things word perfect, that's not the way I do it.
That's not the way I memorize it. Many don't, and that's perfectly wonderful and fine.
It's just this was I had to do that. So I knew the amount of work I had to do to pull off season one of Newsroom.
I took that work ethic, are we going to sag in, I mean, I won the Emmy for that first season, and only because I had that Northwestern speech. No, I don't think that's the only reason.
I think you were amazing. You were incredible.
That was the episode that they submitted, and literally, we're going to the Emmys, and HBO was saying, look, just enjoy the meal, and you're not going to win. Gandolfini never won the first two seasons, so just enjoy the night.
Okay, all right. You're up against Spacey in House of Cards and Damian Lewis in Homeland and Jon Hamm in Mad Men, Brian in Breaking Bad.
I mean, there was no way. Right.
It was that speech, that Northwestern speech. I can't believe that Aaron wrote your speech for you too, your acceptance speech.
That's so crazy that you had to do that perfectly as well. I think that's over the top.
Is that true? You had to pay him $100,000 for that? We'll be right back. The New Balance 1080 is the ultimate daily trainer combining reliable comfort with top-tier performance.
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So, Jeff, I want to go back to Kill a Mockingbird with Aaron Sorkin on Broadway. It broke some box office record or something like that, right? Top sales of all time or something? That's incredible.
Yeah, I think of the top 10 weekly grosses, we hold the top nine. Wow.
Isn't that unbelievable? That's crazy. And do you guys, I don't know if this is a question to everybody, you know, because I come from theater, you come from theater, that's where it all starts, right? So do you remember when Bravo used to air operas and plays and things like PBS used to air, some great theater stuff, and people watched them all the time.
As a kid, I used to watch them. Did they really? Operas they used to put up? Yeah, they used to do all that stuff.
Do you remember that, Jeff? Did you ever watch that? No, not specifically Bravo, but I remember CBS Playhouse.

Oh, yeah.

Not that I'm old, but not that old.

But I remember seeing Paul Newman as a young actor walking on to a show, CBS Playhouse,

directed by Sidney Lumet.

Oh, God.

Ernest Borgnine as Marty.

They would do stuff like that, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
But I do know, and I'll only use the Mockingbird experience, is that it's different than watching the movie or reading the book. And it's that you feel the play.
For a year, eight shows a week, proudly went Cal Ripken Jr. and didn't miss a show for a year.
That's great. I was on a mission.
That's great. I remember doing God of Carnage with Gandolfini, Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden.
We were doing it, I don't know, seven months. Across the street, they were doing West Side Story, I think.
Arthur Lawrence, 92 years old, they had to bring Arthur in because the 20-somethings were getting drunk on Tuesday night and skipping the Wednesday matinee. The actors, yeah.
Yeah, and Arthur came in and read him the riot act. And there's just a thing.
And Henry Fonda did Mr. Roberts for how many thousand performances?

Never missed.

I'm going, I'm aiming at that.

I'm just going to go old school on that just to see if I could do it.

The other thing, too, was to see if in the 10th and 11th and, yes, 12th month of this show, does it die?

Creatively, do you hit the wall and I can't repeat it and I can't do it anymore. I'm phoning it in.
And I was happy to say that that did not happen. We were performing surgery at 100 miles an hour.
That was the time to see that show. It was at its best because we knew it cold.
Yeah, and we just kept it alive, which is the thing is, it's this listening and reacting, which is a form of improv. It's just against the script.
And that's what we did. You don't know what he's going to say next, so wait to hear what he or she says and then use that.
Half your performance is in the other actor. If you do all that stuff, you can keep it alive enough that you don't hit a wall with it.

That's that old thing that they say,

like acting is reacting,

or as Jason always says,

acting is acting like you're reacting.

But Sean, aren't you planning,

aren't you doing Iceman Cometh on TikTok?

Are you planning that soon?

Yeah, and one minute bites.

Oh, it's going to be so good.

One more question in the weeds about that, just what you just said, you know, listening and then reacting. Isn't that at odds with the sort of mandate to do the style of the fast talking, don't take any gaps, pick up your cues, order of the sort of Sorkinian or Mammet type of rhythm.
I mean, isn't that at odds with hearing what the person just said, doing the proper acting of having that information process, formulate an opinion, construct an answer, then spit it out. All of that timing, certainly you need for comedy, but definitely in drama as well, that you're being asked to eliminate in the interest of just doing a speedy, this is the rhythm I, as the writer, want you to have.
So it says, don't worry about your acting, serve as the rhythm of this writing. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, Mamet wrote a book about that, which pissed me off because it was, you know, don't act, just say my words.

Well, okay.

But here's what, Barnard Hughes was a great actor when I was coming up in the 70s and 80s. And he was in a show called Da, I won a Tony for it.
And I think he was in Midnight, he was, he was in Midnight Cowboy as that guy that ends up with John Voight somewhere. Anyway, Barney told me, and she goes, say A, think B, then say C.
That's one way to do it. If you want to move, say A, and as you're thinking B, say C.
And so that's how you beat it. And, you know, when she, you're not, the cue isn't the last two words of what he or she says.
It's what they said in the middle. But sometimes it is.
Sometimes you don't get the necessary information you need that lives in your response until the end of their last line. You know, like they don't, you know, so it's, I mean, you know, we're in the weeds.
Yeah. And then here's, no, no, no, no.
And then here's what happens, Jason. That's how Aaron goes in because he doesn't want you bringing in all your things.
He wants you to do it the way he wrote it. Okay, great.
Now you're doing episodes. Now you're into the first season.
Maybe you're into the second and he trusts you. Now that pause that he wrote in there, you pitch.
I'm not doing that. I'm going right straight through, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
He sees everything. He hears everything.
And now you're doing not only what Aaron did, and you're sticking to his words. That's the rule.
But you're putting your own thing on it, which changes the way he does it. Because Aaron writes in front of a mirror.
He writes out loud. He plays every part, which that's why there's a sameness to it sometimes but but you you you're able to beat that by having me and Emily Mortar and Tom Sadowski and whomever else you know and they're doing it it's different voices from the same voice so it's you know that it's it's it's tricky but eventually they somebody like Sorkin will will trust you, to let you go.
I mean, he never, he never came to me and, and gave me line readings or anything like that. Uh, anything we, we do the line through, the rehearsal was a line through at six 30 in the morning, sitting in the newsroom.
He'd have all eight of us sitting around there and I'd be off book. There's 13 pages of Sorkin, and I'm standing there 6.30 in the morning, and the first day, everybody's got their pages, and they're looking at their pages, and I'm just going around the room, and I know all 13 of them.
And you're like, you guys are fucked. And then the next day, nobody had any pages.
It's just survival. On Sorkin, it's survival.
How did, so you, I mean, this is, that's so intense. And what an intense experience.
And it takes up so much of your life. Did you ever have time, especially then, for, do you follow sports a lot? I see that you've got a lot of music behind, like instruments behind you.
Like, what do you do to kind of, you know, unwind? Yeah, for the listener, he's, Jeff, you got like 75 guitars behind you. Yeah, it's beautiful.
Yeah, I know. I have a home recording studio that I really enjoy.
I've always played guitar. I've played it since the 70s.
I never played out in a club or anywhere. I started playing in the 70s.
I played out maybe the first time in 2002. Wow.
And I just played on the porch. I was hanging around playwrights off Broadway in the seventies.
And I, I, I had never seen a living, breathing playwright before. I'm 21.
I'm 22. I'm in New York.
I'm at this theater company. And every single one of these playwrights like Lanford Wilson are rewriting a second act.
It was a living, breathing thing, the writing. You know, in college, you just get a published script and the guy's either dead or I don't know.
But that thrilled me. And so the writing thing interests me.
Directing? No. But the writing interested me.
But I'm never going to get a play written and done on Broadway, so I'm going to pick up the guitar, get better at that. Oh, look, here's Doc Watson.
Here's Steve Goodman. Here's Arlo Guthrie.
Now you're into the blues. Jonathan Edwards, shanny, funny.
Christine Lavin writes funny, plays well. They stand there with an acoustic guitar on a stage for 100 minutes, and they hold them.
That's hard to do. And coming from musicals in high school and college, it was like I knew how to do that where suddenly you break into song.
I would just write and write and write and throw them in a notebook and just get better at the guitar and finger picking. And then eventually I had this theater company and we needed to raise money.
so why don't we put you on stage with your guitar and we can sell tickets and that's a whole other deal i i had flop sweat uh and and it took it's like the first time you do carson or letterman or leno or steve or any of the guys fallon know, it's seven minutes and you've got to score. And flop sweat happens, you know, when you're out there for the first time or two on that.
So it was the same thing. But once I learned how to do it, creatively I controlled everything.
There was nobody else telling me what to do, what to sing, what to say, what jokes were completely my own thing. And that was an escape.
And so I just kept collecting the guitars and, you know, I've got too many, but, you know, better than cocaine. Is your life as idyllic as it sounds right now? Can you get perspective on that? I mean, or does it just feel like yours? I mean, do you treat yourself to take a step back and think, I'm happy, I'm healthy.
I've had a long career in an incredibly fickle profession and I've got this family and I'm living on a lake in Michigan. Yeah.
At the beginning, you said, I love when you said, how do you know you've made it? Is it awards? Is it acclaims? Is it money? It just feels like you've made it. You've made it, yeah.
We're here to tell you. Congratulations.
That's what the show's all about. It's very nice.
We let people know if they should be happy or not. Yeah.
You know what? You check out of the Ambition Hotel. You check out of the, where's that next thing? And I got to make more.
And I got to do, I got more and I gotta get, I gotta get, how do I get nominated for that? I just, it's sexy indifference but if you get to a certain point you go, you know what? Pretty good. Pretty good.
I can live with that. And if nothing else happened and it really happened after Atticus on Broadway, that's where I felt that if it ended, I'm good.
Yeah. I'm good.
Yeah. Jeff, thank you so much for coming.
I really truly meant what I said at the top. You are one of my all-time favorites.
I just revere you. I think you're incredible.
Thank you. I appreciate that, guys.
Same. Very nice of you to say yes to this, Jeff.
You're a treasure. Thank you for coming.
Thank you, guys. Yeah, thank you, Jeffrey.
See you. Thank you, buddy.
Bye. See ya, Jeff.
See ya. Nice going, Sean.
Yeah, really good, Sean. Really, really good.
God, I love that guy. I love him.
I think he's great. You know, the thing that really stuck with me, that's why I brought it up at the end, which was, how do you know? When he said, how do you know you've made it? Is it a family? Is it the work? Is it the money? Is it what is it? Is it the car you've always wanted? Is it, you know, it's really- Chicks.
It's chicks. It's chicks, sorry.
It's chicks, yeah, as many as you can. It's, yeah, it's, I do, not to take this down into a dark hole, but, you know, being past 50, it's like, well, if I want to live to be 100, then I've got to admit that I'm on the second half.
And you start to think about how am I doing with the years I've been given? Am I using them well? Because eventually you're going to be inside that last year or last 10 years or whatever, and you're going to start to think back. And at that point, it's going to be too late to change what you've done with the time you've been given.
And it's all of those things, right? I always, yeah, I think, first of all, two things. One is, I remember one time, this was years ago, thinking about this, there was a guy that I used to really look up to as a sort of comedic actor, and he was amazing, and I'm not going to name his name.
Thank you. And I remember thinking, like, he, you could tell that he thought that he...
Is it Gallagher? Tell me if it's Gallagher. You could tell that he thought that he had made it.
You could tell that he thought he was funny. And I thought, I always think about this.
The moment that you think that you've got it is the moment that you've lost it. Yeah.
And so you always have to stay, you always have to sort of stay humble. And I know it's, people are going to be like, yeah, nice try, asshole actor as they're driving or walking or whatever.
It's true. You always have, and you never have to, never think about yourself in the third person.
Never, also I remember hearing somebody say, never use the words my and career next to each other. Like don't talk about, and I try not to think about myself in that way.
I try to, my only responsibility, and I'll go even further down this road is, I always feel like my only responsibility every day is to be happy and look for joy wherever I can and focus on the things that work. And if I do that, if I look for that kind of stuff in everyday life, you know, we all have things that don't work in our lives, but if 95% of the stuff is working, why focus on the 5% that's not? And for me, that's what I try to do on a daily basis.
Again, not to get too... Yeah.
I just wish you'd stop looking at donuts to make you happy. Yeah.
They're not making you happy. And you know what? It's so good.
It's fried dough. Sean thinks that that's wonderful.
Sean thinks that that's a wonderful sentiment. Oh, shit.
Third person. And Sean's ready to wrap this up.
Yeah, you know what Sean's thinking of right now. You're thinking of a way to braid in the word bye, aren't you? You're trying to back into it.
That's all you think about. As soon as the guest goes away, you just try to win the bye contest.
Yeah, you're not listening to what we're saying. You're like Googling things.
Ryan's with bye. But I have to go bye, bye.
I have to go pee-pee bye-bye.

Oh.

I have to make a potty.

I mean, that was like... You can't go.

You can't go until we come up with a worthwhile bye.

What a fucking surrender that was.

That was like the worst.

I have to pay so bad.

Listen, if there was any show that you could do on Broadway, Sean,

because, you know, all this talk about Broadway,

would it be bye be baby birdie?

Bye, bye.

That'll do. Smart.

Nice.

Smart.

Nice.

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