Jeff Daniels is leaving the stage and heading straight back to television.
The actor, who earned a Tony nomination for his performance in Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, will now star in Rust, Showtime’s upcoming series based on Philipp Meyer’s celebrated novel American Rust.
A production start date has yet to be announced, but the star’s final show as Atticus Finch in New York City is scheduled for Sunday, Nov. 3. Ed Harris, 68, will then take over the role for the 64-year-old.
“Jeff Daniels is a bona fide giant on stage and screen, and Dan Futterman is a special writer and we couldn’t be more thrilled to have them together at Showtime,” Gary Levine, president of entertainment at the network, said in a statement. “With vibrant characters caught in an unpredictable murder mystery, Rust will tell the relevant and touching human story of the corrosion of the American dream.”
In Rust, described as a family drama, Daniels will star as Del Harris, a “complicated and compromised chief of police” in a Pennsylvanian Rust Belt town. Harris finds himself in a moral dilemma when the son of the woman he loves is accused of murder.
Daniels has held numerous film roles over the course of his prestigious career, and he notably starred in Sorkin’s The Newsroom for HBO, for which he won an Emmy. He followed that up with Netflix’s Godless and Hulu’s The Looming Tower.
With a fresh straight-to-series order at Showtime, Rust will be executive produced by Daniels and Dan Futterman, who wrote for The Looming Tower, as well as the screenplay for Truman Capote film Capote. Michael De Luca and Elisa Ellis will also serve as EPs.
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