To play former FBI Director James Comey in “The Comey Rule,” Jeff Daniels watched videos, read stories and listened to tapes, hoping to capture the man’s voice.
“I knew, eventually, I’d meet with Jim,” Daniels says during a Zoom conference. “I had his book…I had his audiobook…so I felt I had enough.”
Still, Comey didn’t show until the day Daniels filmed the “loyalty” dinner between the FBI director and President Trump.
Standing on the sidelines, Comey watched as Brendan Gleeson, as Trump, told Daniels, “I need loyalty.”
“It was the first scene opposite an actor as powerful as Brendan and the guy you are playing is sitting there at a monitor watching what you do,” writer/director Billy Ray recalls.
“No rehearsal. Didn’t run lines. Nothing,” Daniels adds. And the scene came off without a hitch.
During a break, Comey came up to Daniels and offered an assessment: “You’ve got my posture, the uprightness.”
“It was just kind of taking what I was given and using it,” Daniels says. The scene had eight-and-a-half pages of dialogue and it was also the first time Gleeson and Daniels worked together.
The goal, says Ray, was to take viewers inside rooms where decisions were being made. “We had an opportunity to let them be Jim Comey for five minutes and see what they would have done given the pressures and constraints facing him.”
Comey, who was appointed to the FBI by President Obama, was criticized for overseeing an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails before the 2016 election. He also was ridiculed when it was revealed he had begun drafting an exoneration letter for Clinton before the investigation was complete. Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017. A memo he had a friend leak said Trump had asked him to end the investigation into National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Taken together, the information became critical to the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
While some will question why this film is airing before the November election, Ray insists, “We didn’t make this series to change people’s votes. The reason that I did this was because I felt the Russians had had a profound and unhappy effect on our political process in 2016 and I wanted the American public to know about that before they went to the polls in 2020.”
Daniels says his political beliefs don’t affect whether he takes a role. “I take on the politics of the character I’m playing – his beliefs, his likes, his dislikes, and that includes politics.”
Had the tables been turned, the 65-year-old Daniels says he would have welcomed the opportunity to play Trump. “I’m glad Brendan did, but I would have jumped at it,” he says. “There’s risk involved. You could fail miserably. If you do it right, he’ll hate it…you know, all those reasons.”
Gleeson, who played Winston Churchill in “Into the Storm,” needed more convincing. “Brendan said no the first time that we offered him the part,” Ray says. “Happily, a month later, he changed his mind and I’m very, very glad he did.”
The film looks at Comey’s time under Trump. Based on his book, “A Higher Loyalty,” it also includes information Ray gleaned from other sources.
“I used his book as a jumping-off point,” Ray says. “I got on a plane and went to D.C. and interviewed dozens of people on my own and did lots of my own independent research. By the time I sat down to write the script, I had input from lots of voices that were not Jim Comey and lots of voices that were critical of Jim Comey.”
Having read enough about the fateful dinner, Daniels says he knew what he had to do when Trump said, “I need loyalty.”
“Jim said he froze and gave him nothing,” Daniels says. “These guys have a pretty good poker face. So that was an easy one to kind of maneuver through.”
Now, as “The Comey Rule” is set to premiere, Ray and company expect plenty of tweets to be directed their way.
“It’s not my goal to wind up with people erecting statues of Jim Comey or tearing them down,” he says. “I just want to tell the story of how heartbreaking it can be to be a public servant in the current landscape of America. When I think about the people who were around Comey at the FBI…they all had their hearts broken by what happened to our country in 2016 and 2017. That was the story.”
“The Comey Rule” airs Sept. 27 and 28 on Showtime.
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