When director Billy Ray approached Jeff Daniels with an offer to play the much-maligned former FBI director James Comey in a new documentary-drama, The Newsroom and Dumb and Dumber star worried it was beyond him.
“He came to me and said, ‘I want you to play James Comey,’ and my first thought was, ‘I don’t have a clue how to do that.’ Then I thought, ‘I’ll say yes, and figure it out later.’ What keeps me interested at this age,” the 65-year-old tells The BINGE Guide, “is trying to do things that I don’t automatically know how I’m going to do. So I commit to it and then figure it out on the fly.”
Daniels may have jumped in at the deep end, but it wasn’t without a safety net.
“I said to Billy, ‘I’ll only play him if you get great actors around me. I don’t want you to save money and just get anybody. I’ll play tennis with them, and if I’ve got something great coming at me then I can come back,” he explains.
“So we got Holly Hunter to play Sally Yates [former U.S. Deputy Attorney-General, who testified during Trump’s impeachment hearings to enormous acclaim] and we got Michael Kelly as Andrew McCabe [Comey’s successor after a one-year stint as Deputy Director], and then once we got Brendan Gleeson [who is mesmerising as Donald Trump], we knew we had a good chance of it being good.”
The new two-part series [to stream over consecutive nights] was based on Comey’s memoir, A Higher Loyalty, and shines a light on the behind-the scenes shenanigans playing out between Daniel’s Comey, whom he portrays as a morally upstanding public servant, to Gleeson’s malevolent, bombastic Trump.
Comey was appointed FBI Director during the Obama administration in 2013, and his dismissal came in 2017, by Trump’s hand; a fate he learned by watching a news report on TV.
The first part of the series focuses on Comey’s distanced relationship with then President Barack Obama (Kingsley Ben-Adir), which is in sharp contrast to the way he’s treated by the President Trump, who many Hillary Clinton supporters believe was helped into office by Comey’s re-opening of the case against her use of a private e-mail server when serving as US Secretary of State.
Part two concentrates on the Comey-Trump relationship and its spectacular and very public disintegration.
As Daniels explains: “We knew the Trump version, which is that Comey was a liar, but we didn’t know Comey’s side of the story or how he felt in those moments. Reading the book helped me get there.”
Comey and his team discovered Trump’s relationship with Russian government officials, including President Vladimir Putin himself, which led to the investigation into the probability of Russian collusion and interference with the 2016 election campaign.
Things become even more uncomfortable between the men – indeed, torturous – during a one-on-one dinner, when Trump demands loyalty from Comey over and above anything that could be deemed ethical or legal.
There was Trump’s request for the bureau chief to “forget” about National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia.
Speaking via Zoom to James Comey, the former security chief remains insistent those “two powers need to be kept at a distance. That’s one of the reasons I was so freaked out by the one-on-one dinner, because he was literally closing that distance and trying to draw me in, returning us to the days of Richard Nixon.”
Comey was thrilled with the casting – of himself and his adversary.
“You see the private menace of Trump that Brendan Gleeson captured in an eerie way. And Jeff Daniels, I think, fully embodied my extraordinarily distortionary discomfort. After watching it, I walked away feeling kind of yucky, to be honest with you.”
He pauses: “With Trump, you feel his menace when you’re in private with him. I did a lot of organised crime investigations during my years in New York. [Comey served as the US Deputy Attorney-General from 2003 to 2005.] He reminds me of a mob boss.”
Daniels adds, “For Comey, justice is bigger, truth is bigger than anything else, and the FBI is bigger than he is, and on the other side, Trump thinks the biggest thing in the world is himself, and doesn’t think about anything past the end of his nose.”
The Emmy winner, meanwhile, was more concerned about making his portrayal true to Comey’s inner life, rather than his physical attributes or mannerisms. “Aside from the hairpiece and the suits, he holds his cards close to his vest. He’s impossible to read, which is the trait of a really good poker player, or certainly an FBI Director.”
As for his adversary, Gleeson’s Trump, Daniels says, “He didn’t go cartoon, he didn’t go Saturday Night Live with it. Brendan worked really hard and went very dark.”
Comey stands at a towering 6 feet 8 inches. Says Daniels, “I had to put two-inch lifts in my shoes and that only got me to six feet, five inches. When Jim showed up on set, and I stood next to him, I realised, ‘I’m
I’m going to need Elton John’s platform shoes.’”
There are many of the belief that had Comey not re-ignited the Clinton e-mail scandal, today’s administration would look very different. Daniels muses, “He did what he thought was right, to protect the F.B.I., but certainly it was politically damaging, and some say it cost her the election.
“I would argue that a few days before the election, it was announced that they didn’t find any evidence against her, but the American public wasn’t paying attention anymore, and that ship had sailed. Her poll numbers dropped and didn’t bounce back,” Daniels adds. “The media had a great story, and that was that Hillary Clinton might be guilty, but let’s run with it [anyway] so it was every night on cable news in America. It was red meat.”
With the 2020 election looming, Daniels is blunt about the duty of the country’s voters
“I think Americans need to put their phones down and they need to get educated. My optimism tells me that because of the last three-and-a-half years, we know a hell of a lot more about Trump than we did back in 2016,” he says. “I fully hope that the American public is paying a little bit more attention in October 2020 than they were in 2016.”
As for Comey himself, if Joe Biden were to win the election and appoint him to investigate the Trump administration’s flagrant violations, would he be up for the task?
He chuckles: “No one’s going to appoint me to anything. The good thing about pissing off both sides of the political spectrum is that I’m highly confident I can’t be appointed to do anything in the government ever again.”
The Comey Rule, streaming from Sunday and Monday on Stan.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMinAFodHRwczovL3d3dy5uZXdzLmNvbS5hdS9lbnRlcnRhaW5tZW50L3R2L2phbWVzLWNvbWV5cy1zaG9ja2luZy1zdG9yeS1wb3J0cmF5ZWQtYnktamVmZi1kYW5pZWxzLWluLXRoZS1jb21leS1ydWxlL25ld3Mtc3RvcnkvNjhiZTUyMjliYTI5MDliZWUzZTJmMjUwM2Y1ZmFmMmPSAZwBaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAubmV3cy5jb20uYXUvZW50ZXJ0YWlubWVudC90di9qYW1lcy1jb21leXMtc2hvY2tpbmctc3RvcnktcG9ydHJheWVkLWJ5LWplZmYtZGFuaWVscy1pbi10aGUtY29tZXktcnVsZS9uZXdzLXN0b3J5LzY4YmU1MjI5YmEyOTA5YmVlM2UyZjI1MDNmNWZhZjJj?oc=5
2020-09-26 11:39:26Z
CBMinAFodHRwczovL3d3dy5uZXdzLmNvbS5hdS9lbnRlcnRhaW5tZW50L3R2L2phbWVzLWNvbWV5cy1zaG9ja2luZy1zdG9yeS1wb3J0cmF5ZWQtYnktamVmZi1kYW5pZWxzLWluLXRoZS1jb21leS1ydWxlL25ld3Mtc3RvcnkvNjhiZTUyMjliYTI5MDliZWUzZTJmMjUwM2Y1ZmFmMmPSAZwBaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAubmV3cy5jb20uYXUvZW50ZXJ0YWlubWVudC90di9qYW1lcy1jb21leXMtc2hvY2tpbmctc3RvcnktcG9ydHJheWVkLWJ5LWplZmYtZGFuaWVscy1pbi10aGUtY29tZXktcnVsZS9uZXdzLXN0b3J5LzY4YmU1MjI5YmEyOTA5YmVlM2UyZjI1MDNmNWZhZjJj
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