“I was a young trial lawyer,” he tells me. “I called the director and I got the part. And so I’m sitting in this restaurant having dinner”—and he opened the Reader. He feared the worst. “The Reader was hard on a lot of people. My recollection is they didn’t mince any words.” And sure enough, his eye immediately confronted a headline that said, “It’s the Acting, Stupid.” But that turned out to be another show. He found the Mockingbird review, and when he read what Langer had to say about him—well, “the whole restaurant must have wondered what just happened.”
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Nate Herman, a veteran of Second City and the Saturday Night Live writing staff, opens a new season of his staged reading series, “Films for the Ear,” this coming Sunday evening at 27 Live in Evanston. The film is Network, and Herman asked Daly to read the role that won Peter Finch an Oscar.
Beale, Daly explains, “was an Ed Murrow man” when that no longer counted for anything. His wife had died, his ratings were down, and he’d just been given two weeks’ notice. And that was terrible, because Beale’s high-profile job as a network anchor had messed with his head in a way Daly understands all too well: “If you’re not on TV, you don’t exist.” To save himself, Beale “decided to become a mad prophet. It gave him the opportunity to stay on television, and he’s shrewd enough to take that opportunity.”
“And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.”
“No, I wonder about it,” he says. Is Beale truly persuaded that he’s been wrong all along? Is he simply tacking one more time to stay on TV? What’s the motivation?
“I was a theater major in college,” Mikva tells me. “When I got out of college I tried to get work acting but it was discouraging so I went to law school But I’ve been acting off and on forever. It’s a whole different side of your brain and life, a whole different part of you. You get to use an emotional part of you. What I like to compare it to is going on vacation, but it’s like being on vacation from yourself and not just your life.”
