HFPA journalist Tina Jøhnk Christensen met actor, playwright, musician and four-time Golden Globe nominee Jeff Daniels at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s offices in West Hollywood.  They talked about the importance of his TV show on Hulu, The Looming Tower.  The drama is based on the book of the same name by Lawrence Wright and tells a story of the rising threat of Osama Bin Landen and Al-Qaeda in the late 1990s.  Daniels plays a chief of the New York FBI’s Counterterrorism Center, John O’Neill, who is convinced that the United States has been targeted for attack by Al-Qaeda.  It also shows the conflict between FBI and CIA.

“I’m always looking for something that I haven’t done and that is harder to find after forty plus years of doing this. I knew nothing about John O’Neill.  I did not know about Larry Wright’s book which had won a Pulitzer so I read that and suddenly we were making something that everyone knew but no-one really knew.  You think you know how 9/11 happened and you think you know who to blame and you’re only partially right and then when you read the book and then you see the series, you just can’t believe it. ”

Daniels was shooting Gods and Generals 100 miles of Southwest of Washington DC when the 9/11 attacks happened.“We had about 300 re-enactors, background actors who were from the Washington DC area dressed up in Civil War uniforms.  The planes hit.  It became evident it was serious.  It was an attack and then the Pentagon got hit with that plane and the director stopped everything about noon and said for those of you who have relatives or family in Washington, particularly in the Pentagon, you should go because a plane has just hit the Pentagon and of the 300 people, we lost easily 200.

“The rest of the crew continued working.“When we wrapped everybody got in a circle and they got a preacher from a nearby church to come out.  We all stood in a circle and listened to the guy and the planes have all been grounded at this point.  There are no planes in the air and then you look up and you can see two F16’s going around Washington DC, you know, that’s it.  Then you go back to the hotel  and you find out what really happened.”

Daniels also talks about different phases in his career, what were his dreams as a young actor, how was it working with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson on Terms of Endearment, how did it feel when he didn’t get an Oscar nomination, what recognition means to him, creating his own theatre, Purple Rose,  being a playwright, working with Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber, and his family values. And wondering whether he will be remembered for the Northwestern speech in The Newsroom.

Listen to the conversation here or, for immediate access to all of our podcasts, subscribe to HFPA in Conversation on iTunes.