Ronald Reagan is a very specific personality. He sounds and walks and holds his head and answers questions in a way that’s unique to him. I read seve
Ronald Reagan is a very specific personality. He sounds and walks and holds his head and answers questions in a way that’s unique to him. I read several books, I studied countless YouTube videos [to play him]. And I memorized the whole script months before we shot. I started working on it in April, and I had the entire script memorized by August 1. I had to know the words before I could do the voice.
Then I was able to utilize the other actors, Jared Harris as [Mikhail] Gorbachev, J.K. Simmons as George Shultz, and Hope Davis as Nancy Reagan. I thought of it as channeling him. And it was very strange to do it. I gotta say, when we got to the end of shooting principal photography, I barely remember doing it. I had mountains and mountains of dialogue as Reagan. I mean, Gorbachev and Reagan sat in this room and never stopped talking. But when we got to that last day of shooting, I had very little memory of doing any of it. That’s never happened to me before. Maybe it just kinda went through me and then it was gone. I hope.
I didn’t really know anything about 1986 in Reykjavík. And it speaks to a very relevant issue even in today’s world of nuclear weaponry and the danger of someone going rogue. Forty-eight years into a career, there’s something that I haven’t done before. You risk failure, and if you pull it off it’s an even greater reward. So I said yes. Someone like Ronald Reagan, certainly there are things he believed in that I disagree with—but you don’t choose roles because of politics, right or left. You choose roles to find out the humanity in him.
The good thing about doing the weekend in Reykjavík is that Reagan was so focused on freedom and the Bill of Rights and human rights. The New York Times had accused him of being a warmonger for building up the military, and Gorbachev accused him of being the same thing. Reagn pushed Gorbachev on emigration, allowing people to leave, asking him to consider that maybe people could worship an almighty god of their choosing instead of just the almighty party. Those things were as significant to Reagan as reducing nuclear weapons. That would be something that people of any political stripe would agree with. After time, they genuinely liked each other enough to keep talking, so they kept talking, and it turned out to be a good thing.
This story is for anybody who cares about peace, cares about a world that can live in harmony, that allows countries to believe different things, believe in different gods, to run their countries the way they want without the threat of being overtaken or blown up. With all the nuclear weapons in the world, there’s no point anymore of disagreeing to the point that we’re gonna go to war, because of the threat of total annihilation, mutually assured destruction. A story about two of the most powerful and hazardous countries in the world sitting in a room and trying to figure out how to bring peace to the whole world is a story worth telling to anyone. —Jeff Daniels
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