Jeff Daniels began performing, somewhat reluctantly, as a sophomore in high school in the ’70s and has not stopped since. Over the past five decades, he’s appeared in fifty-seven films, fourteen television series, seven Broadway productions, and numerous off-Broadway shows. His prolific creative output extends beyond acting too: he’s written over a dozen plays and hundreds of songs; directed and produced; and toured the country as a singer-songwriter. And he has done all this from an unlikely location. Except for a few years in New York City immediately after he dropped out of Central Michigan University, Daniels has always lived in the same small town where he grew up: Chelsea, Michigan.

Daniels’s father was at various times the mayor of Chelsea and its school board president. He was also the second-generation owner of a local lumberyard, which is now co-owned by Jeff’s brother. Daniels was often cast in on-screen roles that were wholesome or a little naive, reflecting his small-town background: in 1998’s Pleasantville, as a 1950s soda fountain operator; in 1985’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, as a wide-eyed film star within a film who leaps off the screen and into Mia Farrow’s real life; in 1986’s Something Wild, as an unwitting accomplice to Melanie Griffith’s illicit adventures. Of that Midwestern-ness, Daniels says that at first it was “either something to overcome or something to defend. And then it was something to be and not apologize for. So I didn’t change who I was, whatever that looked like to casting directors. I’m also not pretty. Handsome. I wasn’t that, and I knew I wasn’t that.”