JEFF EMBRACING AN UNEXPECTED PATH

JEFF DANIELS SHARES THE MOMENT JUST RECENTLY WHEN HE FINALLY KNEW HE'D 'MADE IT' AND WHY HE STILL LIVES IN MICHIGAN INSTEAD OF HOLLYWOOD

- JP MANGALINDAN

Jeff Daniels loathes snakes. Loathes them. But while filming Netflix's new drama series A Man in Full, in which he plays a real estate mogul barreling toward bankruptcy, the actor had to film a scene with an actual rattlesnake. The slithering reptile was in a glass case, but that didn't assuage Daniels's fears. "I can't deal with snakes," he says. "Nobody with a brain in their head is going to pick up a rattlesnake unless you're a rattlesnake wrangler. But we did 10 takes of me trying to taptink, tink, tink―on the glass, and I told myself, 'I'm not going to blink. I'm not going to move."

Daniels, 69, has faced his fears in the past, but they often had more to do with acting choices during his decades-long career than reptiles. There was the time he took the plunge into comedy starring alongside Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber or tackled the iconic role of Atticus Finch in a Broadway production of To Kill a Mockingbird, which earned him a Tony nomination. And while building a career that's led to an Emmy-winning performance as a cable news anchor on HBO's The Newsroom, he also made moves in his personal life, shunning the glare of Hollywood and ruckus of New York City in 1986 to bring up his three kids with his wife, Kathleen, 64, in Chelsea, Mich., where the population hovers around 5,400 people.