Jeff Daniels felt weight of history as Reagan in ‘The Brink of War’

Jeff Daniels plays Ronald Reagan in “The Brink of War,” and while he may not have walked in Reagan’s shoes for the role, he did sit in his chair. The movie, which opens in theatres on Friday, tells the story of the Reykjavík Summit of 1986, the Cold War meeting where Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev sat down in Iceland to talk about reducing their nuclear capabilities.

It was filmed inside Höfði, the same house where Reagan and Gorbachev met, and Daniels made himself familiar with the surroundings before filming began.

“I got a call on a weekend when we were in prep by our gaffer, who had stumbled in to pre-light, and found Jeff in the chair where Reagan sat,” says “The Brink of War” writer-director Michael Russell Gunn, on a Zoom call from New York on Wednesday. “He said, ‘Jeff’s here, he’s in the chair.’ I was like, ‘well, great. Walk away. Walk away, let him be, we’ll come back and light another time.’”

It was the day before shooting started, and Daniels, 71, had been prepping for months to play Reagan. At that point, Daniels says, going into the space and sitting in the chair was about rehearsing, and feeling the weight of everything that had transpired inside the room.

“There was a presence,” says Daniels, of being in the same spot where history had been made nearly 40 years earlier. “You go into a church, there’s a presence. When I did ‘Gettysburg,’ I went to Little Round Top on a Sunday morning, you can feel it. And that was the same thing in this house, that is the pride and joy, I think, of the city of Reykjavík, not to mention the country of Iceland. They’re very proud of what happened there on that weekend in October 1986.”

It was Daniels’ job to do that meeting justice.

Leading up to filming, which took place over 18 days in fall 2024, the Emmy winner and multiple Tony nominee rode around Chelsea on his bicycle, listening to tapes of Reagan on his headphones to study his cadence and the mannerisms of his speech.

During prep, Gunn frequently checked in with Daniels on phone and via Zoom, and he came to visit Daniels at his home. “I drove out to see him and we sat on his porch right there at the lake and talked about it,” says Gunn. “And the foundational element, I think, was the word ‘suggest.’ We wanted to suggest Reagan, because if we pushed it too far, then it becomes caricature. So I knew Jeff could do it, and it was really about helping and finding the confidence in the craft of it.”

Heading into shooting, Daniels memorised all his dialogue, so that when he went in to shoot, he had everything down ice cold. “It’s trying to get to that 100th performance of a Broadway run, where you kind of go, ‘OK, now I know that’s how long it takes,’” Daniels says. “Then I put on the voice, and the mannerisms, and attached it to Michael’s words, and you throw it against the lens and hope that it works.”

Jared Harris (“Chernobyl”) plays opposite Daniels as Gorbachev, and Daniels’ fellow Michigan native (and similarly obsessed Detroit Tigers superfan) J.K. Simmons plays George Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of state. Hope Davis (as Nancy Reagan), and Branka Katić (as Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa Gorbacheva) round out the cast.

Because of the tight shooting schedule, there was no time for rehearsal before cameras rolled.

“Michael did a great job of surrounding me with the kind of actors who came in ready,” says Daniels. “Would it be nice to have rehearsal? Sure. When you don’t have time, you throw it in front of the lens on take one. And that’s where you discover what the other actor is going to do with it.”

That process was similar to “Newsroom,” says Daniels, of the HBO political drama he starred in for three seasons. So he was used to the run-and-gun style. That made it feel like home for the actor, who later this month celebrates the opening of JDs Stage Bistro, his new restaurant and performance venue in Chelsea, just steps from his Purple Rose Theater Company.

Tribune News Service