(electronic dance music playing)
- "To Kill A Mockingbird" returns to Broadway, October 5th,
and Jeff Daniels will step back into his Tony nominated role
as Atticus Finch.
But before he does,
he's starring in a new Showtime limited series,
"American Rust."
I caught up with the Emmy-winning superstar.
- Man can have two reasons for doing the right thing.
This case is poisoning my town.
(suspenseful music)
- [Woman] Someone's probably going to have to
take the blame for this.
- I'm so excited to have you back
in all different forms, Jeff.
Talk about "American Rust"
because that is a show with another complex character
and you've done a lot of incredible TV during this time.
- I've been on a great string
of theater and TV since "Newsroom", to be sure.
"American Rust" was based on a great book
by Philipp Meyer.
Complicated people in a corner of the country
where people have had nothing but bad luck,
have been abandoned.
Left to rust, if you will.
And they're still good people.
Just 'cause they're poor,
just 'cause they're stuck in this town,
just 'cause they can't get out,
doesn't mean they're bad people.
They're just good people with a lot of bad luck.
(somber guitar music begins)
- [Tamsen] We're excited to see you
back on Broadway before long.
- I'm excited to come back.
I was surprised,
I thought I was done.
And certainly doing Atticus for a year.
I just didn't think
I would ever top that.
And I wasn't interested in trying.
They called in June and just said,
"What will it take?"
And I said,
"Well, one thing is I need Celia.
This is a co-star thing.
So, I need Celia to be back as Scout."
We've got some new people coming in
that have never been in it.
Have never felt that thing,
that Mockingbird is when it goes.
It's a race horse,
written by Aaron Sorkin.
I'm excited to see those people fold into it
and rise up to where Celia and I know where it has to be.
And they will.
This could be a real exciting production,
but I'm thrilled that Celia is back with me.
- Look there's a significance to everything.
There's a special significance to this play.
- Look the play is still relevant.
And I think what we've learned, post George Floyd,
when many people woke up to systemic racism,
is that there's white entitlement,
white privilege, white blindness,
that the history you were taught growing up
isn't the whole history.
And that you've been kind of left
without all the information.
While it's still from a white point of view,
"To Kill a Mockingbird",
white people are the ones who need to hear it
and Broadway is, at least the Mockingbird audience,
is predominantly white.
When I stood on that stage,
as I will again,
and turn to the audience at the last third
of that closing argument and treat them like the jury,
no one moved.
No one moved.
The supposedly most sophisticated theater-goers in the world
did not move night after night after night after night.
I say, you read the book,
you see the movie,
you feel the play.
And that's the power of Harper's book
and the power of Aaron's play.
- And the power of you.
- Well, I ain't bad.
You know.
(both laugh)
- I heard that about you.
I heard that about you.
- The other thing two is, I'm coming back.
I've already dealt with Gregory Peck.
(Tamsen begins laughing)
- I've already dealt with 45 previews
with rewrites every other day.
We've already dealt with the critics.
We already know it works.
All you have to do is relearn it.
I was shooting "American Rust" this summer
and I said, "Get me the script for God's sakes.
Get me Mockingbird.
I wanna see if I can remember a word of it."
And I had act one in a day,
- Wow.
- I could roll the closing argument right now.
It's still there.
It's like the lyrics to that song you loved, you know?
And oh, oh yeah, oh yeah. Boom.
And it's there.
That's the hard part of Sorkin.
It's the memorization
and that's behind me.
So, when I meet the new members of the cast,
who are looking at this epic play,
I'm going, "Let me know when you're off book."
- Let me know when you stop sweating.
- Yes. And there is sweat involved.
There is flop sweat involved.
I've had it.
- I don't know, every time I watch Sorkin I'm like,
"I got to remember to write that down."
I can't remember it two seconds after I've heard it.
Is there a secret to Sorkin?
- There are ways to make it easier.
The hard work is the repetition.
You learn that in the theater.
Theater teaches you to memorize it,
memorize it, word for word,
do not ad lib.
Don't bring in your ideas and paraphrase,
because in my case,
Lanford Wilson will stand up and go, "Stop it."
He will! "Stop doing that, I didn't write that word."
(Tamsen laughing)
- And so you have a respect for the written word
and that's Sorkin's deal too.
Don't change a word.
And you have to do it at a pace,
a hundred mile an hour pace.
I talked to Allison Janney and I said,
"How did you memorize 'West Wing'?"
And she said, there was a trick some of us had,
where if you have a sentence with the words,
refuse, and remember in the sentence,
you circle the R-E of refuse and the R-E of remember.
If you have a sentence that has three P's in it,
sometimes writers use alliteration,
or just two or three things in it.
Even if it's a lot, you circle, circle.
It's like stones across a river
that you get to this one,
then you get to that one,
then you get to that one.
And that can get it into you, the mechanics of it,
of the words in this order.
All of that happens when you rep it, rep it,
rep it, rep it, rep it,
like you do when you do theater eight times a week,
month after month after month.
We kept hiring theater people on "American Rust,"
the show I did.
I, well, we lost the guy
who's going to play this one character.
Can we get a theater guy.
Theater people can handle the dialogue.
Damned if these people didn't show up off book every time,
ready to go on take one.
(somber guitar music plays)