Jeff Daniels’ Iconic ‘Newsroom’ Monologue Has A Political Tie To His Protest Song

Billboard
April 20, 2018
By Hilary Hughes

The actor and musician speaks on his acoustic track, “Hard to Hear the Angels Sing.”

Jeff Daniels’ career on screen spans nearly four decades and an eclectic entourage of roles, and two of his most beloved performances couldn’t be more tonally divorced from each other. 1994’s Dumb and Dumber may have burned the vision of Daniels in a toothpaste blue tuxedo into the brains of audiences forever, but his time playing the brash, ornery news anchor Will McAvoy on HBO’s The Newsroom delivered some of Daniels’ most intense moments on film and secured him a spot on the nominee list for every major Best Actor award throughout the duration of the series. (He took home an Emmy for his work as McAvoy in 2013).

One prescient monologue stands out not only for Newsroom fans, but Daniels, too. In the very first episode of the series, McAvoy — disillusioned by America’s decline on intellectual, industrial and philosophical levels — stuns an assembly of Northwestern University students when he launches a tirade about the United States and how it has a long way to go before it can claim to be the greatest country in the world again. The episode aired in the summer of 2012, a month before Mitt Romney would secure his place as the Republican candidate to challenge Barack Obama in the Presidential election and weeks before now-President Donald Trump would question Obama’s American citizenship with a single tweet.

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