Ready in the wings

AS Jeff Daniels recalls it, writer-director Noah Baumbach suggested that the actor grow a beard for his role of Bernard Berkman, a once-promising novelist turned middle-aged academic in Baumbach’s indie film “The Squid and the Whale.”

But when Daniels arrived on the set to begin the 23-day film shoot, it was obvious his beard had another role in mind: Grizzly Adams.

Baumbach said the whiskers festooning Daniels’ cheeks looked like a “forest was protecting him.” Costar Laura Linney said Daniels’ beard reminded her of the rock group ZZ Top. “And the colors in that beard!” she marveled. “There were beautiful shocks of white. It was remarkable. I just found myself staring at it.”

A similar, seemingly unexpected blooming marked Daniels’ work in the movie. Though he’s often seemed almost invisible on-screen, with his low-key manner and man-of-the-heartland good looks, his role in “The Squid and the Whale” breaks the pattern -- and may well garner Oscar-season speculation for the 50-year-old actor.

In the film, which opens Friday in Los Angeles, Daniels and Linney play a couple whose marriage is failing as her career as a writer begins to take off and his past glory as a novelist is quickly fading. Their sons, played by Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline, are left to grapple with their confusing and conflicted feelings after their parents separate.

There is much for moviegoers not to love about Daniels’ character.

Bernard Berkman (whose unruly beard was trimmed before cameras rolled) is an insufferable know-it-all, a man wallowing in self-pity; a husband who isn’t above showing up his wife during a friendly game of tennis or his youngest son at ping-pong; a man who freely dispenses advice but isn’t willing to critique himself. But it’s the kind of role that actors, especially ones who are stage-trained like Daniels, yearn to inhabit.

“There’s a lot of pain, there’s a lot of truth, there’s a lot of tragic behavior [in Berkman], but he’s also funny,” Daniels said. In fact, it was the character’s humor that drew him to Baumbach’s script -- and convinced the director that Daniels was right for the part.

While Linney had been attached to the project for four years, Daniels came into the picture much later. By that time, though, Baumbach said, the film had been downsized with a meager $1.5-million production budget.

He turned to Daniels because “I always wanted someone who could be funny to play the part,” said the director, who drew on his childhood experiences when writing the screenplay. “I didn’t want it to be a comic portrayal, but I wanted someone who could be inherently funny -- and also someone who is a great actor. Jeff is both.”

Baumbach said it is through the actor’s eyes that Berkman is revealed. “There is something very sad about his eyes to me,” Baumbach said. “They tell you he’s someone who wants to be revered but also be taken care of.”

As if to showcase his range, Daniels also appears in a supporting role in George Clooney’s new political drama, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” currently in theaters, playing an entirely different type of character.

The film examines CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow as he takes on communist-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the height of the Red scare in the early 1950s. Daniels portrays “Sig” Mickelson, the head of the CBS Network News and Public Affairs division, a corporate news executive with Brylcreem-slick hair and padded shoulders in his suits who has to deal with Murrow and his group of uncompromising journalists as they battle McCarthy on the air.

“He’s so overmatched. He’s just a corporate guy,” Daniels said of his character in the film, which was co-written and directed by Clooney, who also has a supporting role in the film.

Speaking from his home in Chelsea, Mich., Daniels said he took the role not only as an opportunity to work with Clooney but also because “Good Night, and Good Luck” resonates in today’s political climate.

“I love how one man in the press stood up and said, ‘Wait a minute, there is something very wrong here,’ ” Daniels said of Murrow. “Especially in the last several years, the press has not done that or not been allowed to do that -- take your pick. We don’t have McCarthyism today, but history is repeating itself.... Money is everything, there is an arrogance of power, people speak up and are demoted. It’s a wonderful time for this movie to come out.”

No paucity of roles

FOR more than two decades, Daniels has been considered one of Hollywood’s most durable yet unheralded character actors. While he has worked with directors such as James L. Brooks in “Terms of Endearment” and Woody Allen in “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” stardom has eluded him as an actor.

Yet filmmakers know they can rely on Daniels, whether it’s for a serious drama, such as Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours,” in which Daniels played the ex-lover to AIDS-stricken Ed Harris, or Peter Farrelly’s 1994 comedy “Dumb & Dumber,” in which Daniels played a dog groomer alongside the zany Jim Carrey.

“I did [‘Dumb & Dumber’] when my career was kind of floundering,” Daniels recalled. “... I knew it was a comedy only 15-year-old boys would like. None of us knew it would explode [into a blockbuster hit] the way it did.”

Daniels’ made his big-screen debut with a bit part in 1981’s “Ragtime,” but the role that first earned him recognition was as Debra Winger’s character’s two-timing husband in “Terms of Endearment,” which also starred Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson.

“Nobody else wanted it,” he said of his portrayal of Flap Horton. “Talk about unsympathetic. I was the husband of Debra Winger and was cheating on her while she was dying of cancer. But to be in a movie with Debra and Shirley and Jack, I mean, I would go on the set on days when I was not supposed to work and try to learn from these people.”

His breakthrough role came in Allen’s 1985 romantic comedy, “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” in which Daniels portrayed a movie character who literally walks off the screen and into the life of a woman in the audience played by Mia Farrow. The movie made such an impact on Daniels that he named his theater repertory company in Michigan the Purple Rose Theater Company.

For an actor who was then living in New York, Daniels said, working on a Woody Allen movie was something to strive for, like “doing a Clint Eastwood movie and getting shot,” Daniels said, referring to how his character, a psycho killer, meets his end in Eastwood’s 2002 crime drama, “Blood Work.”

Daniels said that halfway through the film, Allen turned to him and said, “You’re good.” “From that moment on, none of it mattered,” Daniels recalled. “I never said, ‘I’m going to be a big star.’ I said, ‘I’m going to be a good actor.’ And that took the pressure off.”

Daniels has twice been nominated for best actor in a musical or comedy at the Golden Globe Awards -- once for “The Purple Rose of Cairo” and the following year for Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild.”

In recent years, he has appeared in such films as “Fly Away Home” (his costar in that movie, Anna Paquin, also appears in “The Squid and the Whale”), “101 Dalmatians,” “Speed,” “Pleasantville,” “The Butcher’s Wife,” “Arachnophobia,” “Gettysburg” and “Because of Winn-Dixie.”

Daniels said one reason fame may have eluded him is the decision he and his wife, Kathleen, made to put family over career and raise their three kids in their hometown near Ann Arbor, Mich.

“I moved to Michigan in 1986 after 10 years in New York,” Daniels said. “Whatever star I had was rising [at the time], but Kathleen and I made the decision that family would come first and career second. We stuck to it. That means I was on airplanes; that means I didn’t do movies back to back to back; that means I lived in a part of the country that is unglamorous. I wasn’t around to go to other people’s premieres. I was not in L.A. or Hollywood. I was in Michigan.”

Linney said that has kept him grounded and ultimately served him well. “He doesn’t try too hard and, consequently, it’s because he is knitted to the work, he knows what his job is and his job is really serving the material first.”

Added Baumbach, “There’s something deceptively simple about how he acts. It reminds me of Spencer Tracy. It’s almost like he isn’t doing anything, but he is really doing so much.”