The GREAT AMERICAN dream is an ideal that not just Americans but people around the world long for. However, the new show, American Rust, an adaptation of the novel of the same name, paints a different picture of the country — one that is removed from the glamour and comfort of big cities.
The man who is bringing this show to the OTT space is an artiste who has always offered something insightful and deep to ponder over with his perfor-mances. Jeff Daniels, the actor who is known for movies such as Dumb and Dumber, Good Night, and Good Luck, Looper, and more recently the HBO political drama series, The Newsroom (for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award), plays the lead role in American Rust.
Starring opposite Jeff in American Rust is actress Maura Tierney who has been part of films such as Primal Fear, Liar Liar, Insomnia and The Report. With American Rust, the actors tell the story of the country’s Rust Belt and the people living in these areas. On a Zoom interview, the actors tell us more. Excerpts.
What were your thoughts when you read the book? Jeff Daniels: I found the book with Paul Martino who is my agent at Showtime now and is one of the executive producers on the show, at a 2009 reading in Down-town Manhattan. It was Philipp Meyer’s debut novel and he was reading passages from the book at a bookstore, and we kind of bird-dogged the book. I wasn’t in a position to get anything made until after Newsroom and other shows, and then when my agent was asking me, ‘What do you want to do?’ I told him there’s this book.
I showed it to Dan Futterman (creator and showrunner of American Rust) who I had worked with in The Looming Tower, and asked him, ‘Do you see something in this?’ He said, ‘I do, I really do!’ So, I had my writer and off we went. Then Dan met with Showtime, and they said they wanted to do this, next thing we knew was that we were setting up for the shoot, when the pandemic hit and we were sitting for a year. But then, they got to finish the season.
Jeff, after all these years, what is it that you look for in a role? I don’t want to repeat myself. I am not somebody who brands himself like Clark Gable, Jim Stewart, Garry Cooper or Tom Cruise. Careers have been made on such star performances. But I have always been attracted to character work by others who change themselves and play different personalities. This is what I am looking for — ‘complicated, challenging, easy-to-screw-up, risk failure’ kind of roles. At this point that’s what keeps me interested. Premieres on Sept 12, on Voot Select.