A Man In Full's Jeff Daniels Talks "Larger Than Life" Character & Finding "Some Good" In Villains

Summary Jeff Daniels' TV dominance continues with A Man in Full, his first collaboration with Netflix.

The miniseries adaptation of Tom Wolfe's novel of the same name revolves around an Atlanta mogul facing bankruptcy and fighting back.

Daniels found playing a morally ambiguous character "frighteningly easy" and enjoyed the challenges of finding humanity in the role.

Jeff Daniels continues his TV dominance with A Man in Full. Since holding his first major television show role with HBO's The Newsroom, the two-time Emmy winner has steadily built an impressive filmography on the small screen, starring in everything from the acclaimed Western miniseries Godless to Showtime's two-part political miniseries The Comey Rule and the American Rust adaptation. Interestingly, the new show marks Daniels' first collaboration with Netflix after multiple collaborations with Prime Video and Hulu for the acclaimed miniseries adaptation of The Looming Tower.

Much like most of his recent shows, A Man in Full is a miniseries adaptation of the book of the same name from Tom Wolfe, the author best known for The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities. The Netflix drama revolves around Daniels' Charlie Croker, an Atlanta real estate mogul whose massive empire begins to crumble when his shady dealings result in his facing bankruptcy, resulting in an all-out business and political war against those trying to bring him down.

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Alongside Daniels, the ensemble Man in Full cast includes Diane Lane, William Jackson Harper, Aml Ameen, Tom Pelphrey, Sarah Jones, Jon Mihael Hill, Chanté Adams, Lucy Liu, Bill Camp and Evan Roe. David E. Kelly, best known for his Emmy-winning work adapting Big Little Lies for HBO, as well as Hulu's Nine Perfect Strangers and Netflix's The Lincoln Lawyer, developed the Wolfe adaptation, with Oscar winner Regina King also on board as an executive producer and directing the first and last two of its six episodes.

In anticipation of the show's premiere, Screen Rant interviewed Jeff Daniels to discuss A Man in Full, the "fun and complicated" challenge of finding "some good" in his villainous character, and his reflections on Arachnophobia ahead of James Wan's in-development remake.

Playing Charlie Croker Was "Frighteningly Easy" For Daniels

Image via Netflix

Across his near-50-year career, Daniels has often become associated with playing nice guy characters, particularly with one of his breakout performances in Dumb & Dumber, the Keanu Reeves-led Speed and the Ryan Reynolds-co-starring Paper Man, among others. While recent years have seen him play morally ambiguous characters, Charlie Croker is one of the most villainous Daniels has embodied, which he found "frighteningly easy":

Jeff Daniels: Frighteningly easy. [Chuckles] Tom Wolfe wrote a great book back in the late '90s, and David E. Kelly adapted it, and those two people did a lot of the work for me. It's complex, but it's all there, and I love this kind of Shakespearean fall from being rich beyond any imagination, larger than life, the star of his own show. Everyone he meets is his audience, he's just so full of himself, thus the title, and then we cut his knees out. The bank basically says, "You owe us a lot of money, and you think we're just going to refinance, but you owe us $800 million by Tuesday. You say you're going to build another skyscraper, and then you take some of the loan and buy another private jet and a quail plantation." He's just corrupt, so, it was a lot of fun to kind of pop that balloon. And just for six episodes, let it just [deflate sound] all over the place. It gets worse [after episode 3]. [Chuckles]

For Daniels, playing a character with these various layers proved to be a "fun and complicated" challenge, noting that the biggest key for him was to "find some good" in Croker in order to authentically play him:

Jeff Daniels: No, it's a challenge, it's kind of a basic tenant of acting, if you're playing a villain, you try to find some good in them, and if you're playing a hero, you try to find a couple of weaknesses. And it's similar with Charlie, he comes to it, it certainly isn't there in the first episode or two, that's for sure. He's blind to his own idiocy, and obliviousness to anyone and anything around him, other than himself. He comes to it, he gets to it, I think David kind of helped the book that way. He kind of steered Charlie to a little bit of humanity by the end, certainly with his son, and even with his young wife, he kind of gets to it. But that's what makes it challenging and fun and complicated, and not just "Here are the heroes and here are the villains."

Daniels Would "Still Be In Therapy" If Arachnophobia Had A Different Central Creature

Though having starred in a wide variety of genres throughout the years, one that Daniels has only briefly explored is horror with 1990's Arachnophobia, helmed by Amblin co-founder Frank Marshall, which is set to get a remake from James Wan and Freaky's Christopher Landon. While Daniels hasn't heard anything about the remake, he does look fondly back on his experience with the horror-comedy, while also humorously sharing he would "still be in therapy" if the main creature was something else:

Jeff Daniels: No one's talked to me, but I enjoyed doing it. I'm glad it was spiders and not snakes, I couldn't have handled it, I'd still be in therapy if it was snakes. [Chuckles] All I remember is the last two weeks of that shoot, where we said goodbye to John Goodman, and everybody clapped, and then there were two weeks left of shooting with just me and that huge spider in the basement. My costar was that spider, as big as my hand that could rear up and hiss. They would put a rat in its cage on Friday to feed it, and then they would take out the tail on Monday.

About A Man in Full

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When Atlanta real estate mogul Charlie Croker faces sudden bankruptcy, political and business interests collide as Charlie defends his empire from those attempting to capitalize on his fall from grace.

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A Man in Full begins streaming on Netflix on May 2.Source: Screen Rant Plus