2 l September
12 - 18, 2021
Northeast Oregon TV Weekly
BY GEORGE DICKIE
Maura Tierney and Jeff Daniels
star in “American Rust,” premiering
Sunday on Showtime.
Showtime’s ‘American Rust’ a tale
of family, despair and murder
Del Harris is a man whose calm, composed
exterior belies a war going on inside.
As played by Jeff Daniels (“The Newsroom,”
“Steve Jobs”) in the Showtime drama series
“American Rust,” premiering Sunday, Sept. 12,
he’s the chief of police in Buell, Pa., a forlorn
Rust Belt town outside of Pittsburgh that’s
pockmarked by deserted factories and empty,
decaying buildings.
A veteran of the war in Iraq, he takes a cocktail
of opioids to keep his PTSD at bay but struggles
with maintaining the diminishing dosages his
doctor prescribed. He has a love interest in Grace
(Maura Tierney, “The Affair”), but she also has
an ex-husband who won’t go away and a son,
Billy (Alex Neustaedter, “Colony”), who has a
propensity for getting into trouble after turning
down a football scholarship and getting dumped
by the love of his life, Lee (newcomer Julia
Mayorga).
But despite everything, Del still pines for Grace
and is protective of Billy, even stepping in to get
the kid probation after he clubbed a guy with a
board in a bar fight. But when a dead body turns
up in an abandoned mill and Billy is implicated,
Del must decide the lengths to which he will go
to protect the son of the woman he loves.
Based on the novel by Philipp Meyer, the
series is the story of good people making bad
choices in places that progress seems to have left
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behind, the type of people that Daniels, a native
Michigander, knows well.
“I am one of those folks that comes from a part
of the country that can feel less, can feel inferior,
the fly-over country, the you’re-not-from-the-
coasts,” the actor explains. “So I understand that.
I’d lived with it as an actor going in and sitting
in waiting rooms against people from Yale and
Juilliard and the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Arts. I understand those people and that person.”
Del’s relationship with Grace is reflective
of that. He clearly cares for her but she seems
on the fence about him, and when he sees her
with her ex, he backs off. But Daniels’ working
relationship with Tierney is the opposite. He
praises his co-star for being a smart actress,
a worthy acting partner and someone who
“jumped off the cliff with me” in terms of
making acting choices.
“I’ve always said half my performance is in
the other actor, which is another way of saying
listen and react,” Daniels says. “And if you do
that, you’ll have chemistry but you can’t do
that with someone who’s just waiting for you to
stop talking and then is going to do whatever
they’re going to do. Maura didn’t do that. Maura
said, ‘Oh, OK, I get it,’ and jumped in. ... Now
you’ve got that thing they call chemistry and that
happened early on with us.”
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