If you have been in 12-step program for a while, you have probably heard the mystical tales of active alcoholics who decided one day to stop drinking and have been fine ever since. Well, it appears, Jeff Daniels was one of those people. In an interview with Anna Sale on WNYC’s podcast, Death, Sex and Money, The Newsroom star says he had stopped drinking in his 30s by just deciding not to do it anymore. But 14 years later, two months after his 50th birthday, Daniels was alone in a hotel room and heard a voice ask, “Haven’t you punished yourself enough?” causing him to make a b-line for the mini-bar. This voice was his own and it’s when the actor finally understood what it meant to be powerless.
You Can Until You Can’t
Though he doesn’t go into the dregs of his drinking career, Daniels admits to once deciding not to drink and then finding himself cracking a beer at 11 am. So he quit “cold turkey” (implying without rehab or a 12-step program) on the mere realization that drinking was stupid and not something he needed in his life. His commitment to abstinence lasted nearly a decade and a half, but like so many former drinkers before him, Daniels became powerless to keep that commitment when he found himself unhappy in his career. “You think you can beat it,” Daniels says, “you think you can outweigh it, outlast it, and then you find out one day that you can’t.”
Though brief, Daniels learned an important lesson about himself and his disease during his three-month relapse—that he can’t do sobriety on his own.
But How…?
Some people may wonder how a person with as much notoriety and success as Jeff Daniels could be unhappy with his career. But as a fellow alcoholic, I completely understand (minus knowing what it feels like to have a wildly successful career). Though all actors are probably a bit insecure and worried about falling out of favor, it must be especially brutal for the ones who also have that pesky warped perception of reality that comes with the disease of alcoholism. In fact, you can hear just how brutal it is in the opening tag of Daniels’ interview when he explains how his deepest fears lead him back to his hometown. “Suddenly you get a phone call from the agent who says, ‘I hate to tell you this but you are over, it’s done.’ I went back to Michigan so I didn’t have to be one of those guys.” Sounds awful, does it? But don’t worry, he fictionalizing. There isn’t a Hollywood agent alive who has the balls to be that honest.
The most compelling part of this interview is Daniels’ observations about the cruel, exclusionary and utterly disposable nature of show business—admitting that for years he couldn’t even watch the Oscars because it was too painful to see people with lesser talent making more strides in his profession. You almost hear the alcoholic voice in Daniels’ head telling him what a sad, inferior person he is and that no matter how hard he works, he is just not destined to be great.
Not Destined to Be Great?!
Even if you weren’t a fan of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s cutting-edge drama on HBO that earned Daniels an Emmy, it would be hard to avoid at least one of his numerous film roles over the last 35 years—notably, as Harry Dunne in Dumb and Dumber with Jim Carrey. Though the screwball comedy reached cult classic status, the previously “serious” actor says that it took a decade for Hollywood to take him seriously again. But in 2005, when he played Bernard Berkman, a bitter, out-of-work writer and cynical father in The Squid and The Whale, most of us can agree it was worth the wait. Since then, Daniels has worked in nearly two-dozen projects and continues to kick ass into his 60s.
But can Daniels recognize his fortune? From the sounds of it, he doesn’t see himself as a midwestern boy who managed to break into Hollywood and become a household name. He sees himself as a man with talent who chose family over career and is now in defeated acceptance of his life. And that’s alcoholism. That asshole in our heads that doesn’t allow us to enjoy our wins or learn from our losses. It’s just a perpetually unsatisfied teenager who won’t stop asking for something better. No matter how many jobs booked or awards are accepted, there is always someone who is getting more than you—someone who doesn’t deserve it—and their success is your failure. I know that feeling like that back of my hand (actually, way better since I don’t even know if I could pick out the back of my hand in a line-up). It’s a horrible feeling and its been my experience that without some serious reliance on a power greater than myself, it only gets worse.
Photo courtesy of iDominick [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons (resized and cropped)
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