Jeff Daniels interview: ‘A Man in Full’

SPOILER ALERT: This article and video contain spoilers for this series.

“The trick is the audience has to care enough about him to want to follow his story,” shares Jeff Daniels about his “larger than life” character Charlie Croker on the Netflix limited series “A Man in Full.” That may seem like a tall order with this particular role, as the Emmy-winning actor describes him as “despicable, disgusting, neanderthal, misogynist, all that stuff,” but the performer makes it riveting to watch, especially as the episodes follow his “deterioration.” As he describes, the arc of the show is “like a blimp and sticking a pin in the blimp and for six episodes watching it spiral down to the ground.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.

“A Man in Full” centers on Croker, a billionaire real estate developer in Atlanta, Georgia, who is so in arrears and over-leveraged that his bank starts to call in the hundreds of millions of dollars that he owes. Daniels’ process of inhabiting this bombastic figure began with his accent, which he “worked hard on over the summer,” particularly because it was so richly described in the original novel by Tom Wolfe as “so thick at times when he went full-on Baker County that you couldn’t understand him.” Croker also walks with a limp from an old football injury, a physical characteristic that the Tony-nominated actor calls one of many “ornaments on the tree,” or “physical stuff – attributes – that you can cling to as you become someone else.”

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Daniels read Wolfe’s novel of the same name one time prior to the start of production, though he notes with a chuckle that the 740+ page tome is “not short.” Because the late writer was “incredible with his details,” the book was “a great jumping off point,” especially once he married the insights from the source material with David E. Kelley’s scripts. The Emmy winner has now worked with television greats like Kelley and Aaron Sorkin (“The Newsroom”) and comments that in both these writers’ works, “It’s a singular point of view. You can hear Sorkin, you can hear Kelley, and I like that.” On this project in particular, he observes that it was “such a luxury” to have Kelley’s writing and shares, “Execute what he wrote and you’ll probably do pretty well.”

Daniels decided early on that in order to portray this huge figure, he had to hold nothing back. He remembers telling directors Regina King and Thomas Schlamme, “I’m coming in big, and if it’s too much you’ll tell me, but the character was written larger than life.” He attributes the “fearlessness” he brought to “A Man in Full” to his time working with Jim Carrey on “Dumb and Dumber,” emphasizing that his costar is “a comedic genius” who always “started at 11” out of a scale of one to 10. “I did a lot of homework and I hit it right off the bat,” recalls the actor about his approach.

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Some of Daniels’ best scenes are opposite Bill Camp and Tom Pelphrey as the bank higher-ups who blindside Croker with their demands of repayment of his loans, especially the scenes in which they wage battle in the bank boardroom. “The three of us made a pact together that we’re going to hold hands and jump off the cliff together,” shares Daniels about how they approached the bombastic material. So much of those scenes play out with Camp and Daniels at opposite ends of the humongous table, and the two-time Emmy winner says that “the fact that we’re confined to sitting is a great obstacle,” explaining, “You’re confined to the chair and the rage is building, and then you get to use the pauses and you get to use those subtle lean-ins.” The performer calls those scenes “special” and says they are the ones he will remember most from the series.

“A Man in Full” ends with a dark, and darkly comedic, climax as Croker dies of a heart attack while strangling Pelphrey’s Raymond Peepgrass for conspiring with Charlie’s ex-wife Martha (Diane Lane) to strip his company away from him. “I thought it was a wonderful ending, a great surprise no one could see coming,” observes Daniels about the shocking finale. He notes that the last episodes feature Croker making “amends” with his wife and son, which demonstrates that “there was a heart inside the guy.” The fact that his heart ultimately gave out made a great deal of sense to the actor, who states, “Someone that stressed out probably would meet that kind of end eventually.” As for the very last shot – in which Croker’s hydraulic knee continues bending after his death – the actor says, “I fell out of my chair when I read that.”