In the middle of shooting the fifth episode of The Newsroom, the show’s lead Jeff Daniels fell to a knee.
“Give me the line again,” he yelled to the script supervisor. “Give me the line again.” She yelled back the line. He just has to repeat it. He can’t. “Give me it again.” She does once then twice more. He can’t keep a single word in his head. “Ok Jeff,” the director said. “Why don’t you go home?”
In his two decades of acting, Daniels never struggled like this. This was his first time working for screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Every actor who gets asked about working for Sorkin inevitably mentions the word “dialogue.” Sorkin is known as a master of writing dialogue.
And as is the nature of working for a master, expectations are high. “You have to memorize mountains of dialogue,” Daniels said. “And then you have to spit it out at a hundred miles an hour.” That means actors can’t do what actors typically do: memorize their lines in the makeup chair. “I’ve seen day-players come in on Newsroom, and they’re trying to learn three pages of Sorkin in the makeup chair, and the flop sweat hits them. I’ve never seen it anywhere else.” ¹
Daniels would come to call it “getting Sorkinized.” He was the first to fall to a knee in that first season of filming The Newsroom but not the last. “We all, at some point, took a knee.” ²
Daniels tells this story when asked how he decides what jobs to take. He said he has to be at least pretty sure the job will be at least pretty hard. Because if it’s not hard, it’s easy. If it’s easy, he’s not getting better. If he’s not getting better, what is he doing?
We’re not done with Daniels. But before I tell you about what happened after he got Sorkinized, I want to tell you something about trees. Trees live off sunlight. Nutrients produced through photosynthesis fuels a tree’s growth. But easy access to light does a tree no good. Ideally, trees spend their first decades in their mothers’ shade. Because in the struggle for light, forester Peter Wohlleben writes, “they develop wood that is incredibly dense.” Youngsters free from this struggle for light grow fast. That means they develop wood that is airy, with plenty of room for fungi and yeasts and smuts and molds and mildews. A tree that doesn’t have to struggle, in other words, rots. “Developing mighty trunks,” Wohlleben writes, “takes a great deal of energy.” It requires that a tree “struggle for every ray of sunlight.” ³
If you don’t have to struggle a little, you’re not growing. If you always pick up the same pound weights, your muscles don’t get stronger. If you always run at the same pace, you don’t get faster. If you always play the same three chords, you don’t get better at playing the guitar.
I got to be a fly on the wall for a conversation between Ryan Holiday and Chris Bosh. They talked about something I think about often. Chris said it was something he learned from Kobe Bryant: you gotta love the parts that aren’t fun, you gotta love a little struggle. Playing in the NBA is fun. Practicing and conditioning and sacrificing enough to make it to and in the NBA is a struggle. Publishing books is fun. Writing and researching and thinking and rethinking is a struggle. Filming a scene (when you’ve got all the lines in your head) is fun. Memorizing mountains of lines is a struggle. Acing a client presentation is fun. Preparing and ideating and considering that you might not ace it is a struggle.
Chris said he has this thing he says to himself anytime he’s struggling, “I always like to think, ‘how many people would quit right now?’ That’s the first thing I think about. Then I keep going.” ⁴
Jeff Daniels kept going. A few months after getting Sorkinized, he won an Emmy Award for Lead Actor in a Drama Series for the first season of The Newsroom. A few years later, he got a call from Sorkin, who had just acquired the stage rights for To Kill a Mockingbird and wanted Daniels to play Atticus Finch. Sorkin warned him that what they were attempting—adapting a book almost universally beloved for the stage—was probably a “suicide mission.” “I didn’t blink,” Daniels said. “I’ve just been going, ‘if you aren’t challenged, then don’t do this anymore.'” ⁵ The play opened on Broadway in December of 2018. It shattered opening week box office records and became the highest grossing play in Broadway history.
Struggling is not always a good thing, of course, but good things are almost always on the other side of a little struggle. It’s good to be in the shade struggling for some light. It’s good to pick up a weight that feels a little too heavy. It’s good to run a little faster than your pace. It’s good to reach a point where you want to quit—it’s a wall trying to keep everyone else out too. Keep going.
Sources:
[1] Jeff Daniels | Smartless
[2] Newsroom’s Jeff Daniels on the Rigors and Rewards of Sitting in the Anchor Chair
[3] The Secret Wisdom of Nature by Peter Wohlleben
[4] Chris Bosh on Stoicism, Embracing the Process, and Staying Present | Daily Stoic
[5] Broadway’s To Kill A Mockingbird | Jeff Daniels, Aaron Sorkin + More | Talks at Google
Thank you to Greg Shildkrout and Katie McKenzie for reading drafts of this.