Jeff Daniels explodes at Full Man.

When Jeff Daniels finished filming "Dumb and Dumber To" in 2014, he was ready to leave show business. "I'm done," he told Jim Carrey. "You can't stop, man," Carrey replied. "You're creative, you'll create something, you need to keep creating. That's what we do!"

In our time, Kerry is painting in Hawaii. And when Daniels isn't filming, he writes songs and plays that he stages in the theater of his hometown in Michigan. "That's what keeps me going," Daniels said in a Zoom interview. "That's what really keeps me alive. It's what I have to do. It helps me get through the time between calls for work. Because you can go crazy staring at that phone. They'll call when they need you. And that's why I've always struggled with depression or the fear of not working anymore, by working on other things that don't require Hollywood to need me."

The career growth of Jeff Daniels

Always a hardworking actor in film ("The Word of Friendship," "Something Wild") and theater ("The Tempest," "To Kill a Mockingbird"), Daniels found his place as a senior star actor, possessing both seriousness and danger. He broke through in his fifties with the help of Aaron Sorkin, who showcased him as a ruthless news anchor with an ethical twist in the HBO series "The Newsroom" (2012-2014).

After "News Service," Daniels won his second Emmy as a one-armed western villain in Scott Frank's "The Unbeliever" (Netflix). He portrayed two prominent FBI heroes, John O'Neill in "The Leaning Tower" (Hulu) and James Comey in "The Comey Rule" (Showtime), as well as the police chief of Pennsylvania in Dan Futterman's "Rust of America" (Showtime). A third Emmy may be on the horizon, as Daniels surpassed himself playing the megalomaniacal Atlantic real estate mogul Charlie Croker in the entertaining six-part Netflix adaptation of Tom Wolfe's 1998 novel "A Man in Full."

The relevance of Charlie Crocker's role

The cleverly updated series fits perfectly into today's crazy climate. "It's relevant," Daniels said.