Michigan's Jeff Daniels is latest actor to take role of a US president

Michigan’s resident movie star, Jeff Daniels, will be back in multiplexes Friday, Aug. 14, this time playing Ronald Reagan in "The Brink of War."

The political drama recounts the tension and uncertainty that preceded an historic 1987 nuclear arms deal between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (Jared Harris) that, as the film puts it, could bring the world ”closer to peace ... or destruction.”

Another local cinema favorite, J.K. Simmons (who was born in Grosse Pointe), stars as Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz.

Daniels as Reagan might be one of the more unexpected presidential castings in recent memory. Then again, sometimes the oddest pairings lead to the best results where actors and commanders-in-chief are concerned, as the examples below illustrate.

Best presidential panache

Bill Murray has little in common with the only man to be elected to the Oval Office four times. But his weary jauntiness as Franklin Delano Roosevelt facing America’s entry into World War II in “Hyde Park on Hudson” (2012) is just about perfect.

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Best of the most unlikely

The Encino Man in charge of pulling off D-Day? Brendan Fraser doesn’t exactly look or sound like Eisenhower in “Pressure” (2026), yet the weight of such a responsibility and inherent decency that he conveys with his performance explains why we like his Ike.

Best siblings

Way before he was beloved TV prez Jed Bartlet in "The West Wing," Martin Sheen played attorney general Robert Kennedy in a 1974 docudrama about the Cuban Missile Crisis, “The Missiles of October,” and RFK's brother John F. Kennedy in the 1983 miniseries “Kennedy.”

Best look-alike

Rarely has an actor captured the visage of a former president as well as Bryan Cranston did in the 2016 HBO biopic about Lyndon Johnson, “All the Way.” From the receding hairline and furrowed brow to the way he squinted fiercely while driving home a point, Cranston became a stunningly accurate double for LBJ.

Best comedic turn

Even Anthony Hopkins (who played the Oscar-nominated title role in 1995’s “Nixon”) couldn’t sum up the tortured soul of Richard Nixon as succinctly as Dan Hedaya did in 1999’s “Dick,” a quirky comedy about two teen girls (Michelle Williams, Kirsten Dunst) who get immersed in the Watergate scandal. As a self-pitying president who finds solace through marijuana-laced cookies, Hedaya steals every scene that includes him.

Best body language

The shoulders squared to face the press. The quick, bird-like swivels of the head. The slumped posture while seated that reveals he’d rather be at his ranch. Somehow, Josh Brolin was a movement doppelganger of George W. Bush in "W," Oliver Stone’s 2008 saga of presidential father-son rivalry.

Best young man as a future president

It’s a tie between Parker Sawyers as Barack Obama in 2016's "Southside with You," a depiction of his early romance with Michelle Obama, and Sebastian Stan as an ambitious Donald Trump in 2024's "The Apprentice," who learns power tactics from Roy Cohn.

Best presidential duo

Dennis Quaid lit up the screen playing rocker Jerry Lee Lewis in 1989’s “Great Balls of Fire.” Maybe it was his charisma that helped Quaid succeed as two polar-opposite presidents: Bill Clinton in 2010’s “The Special Relationship” and Ronald Reagan in 2024”s “Reagan.”

Best impersonations with minimal effort to resemble the real thing:

The mid-1970s version of “Saturday Night Live” set the standard for imitations relying totally on attitude, not any makeup magic, with Chevy Chase’s stumbling impression of Gerald Ford and Dan Aykroyd’s voice-driven embodiment of Jimmy Carter.

Best performance with the widest gap in personal politics

Jeff Daniels, an outspoken opponent of Trump, probably won't be getting any invitations to a GOP convention soon. But in the preview for the 2026 drama “The Brink of War,” he becomes Republican icon Reagan, right down to the head nod he used for emphasis.

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.