Jeff Daniels to star in Hulu’s 9/11 series The Looming Tower

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

After winning plenty of acclaim for his work on Aaron Sorkin's HBO series The Newsroom, Jeff Daniels is set to return to the world of television for Hulu's upcoming 9/11 drama The Looming Tower. Based upon Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize-Winning 9/11 exposé, the 10-episode, hour-long drama series will trace "the rising threat of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, and takes a controversial look at how the rivalry between the CIA and FBI may have inadvertently set the stage for the tragedy of 9/11 and the war in Iraq."

Jeff Daniels  will star as John O'Neill, "the determined, at times bull-headed chief of the New York FBI’s Counter-Terrorism unit." After becoming rightly convinced that Al-Qaeda is planning an attack on the U.S., O'Neill faces "deliberately insufficient cooperation from other organs of the Federal government, particularly from his counterpart at the frequently antagonistic CIA." Described as a man of appetites, Jeff Daniels' character is a lover of expensive food and drink, and is involved with at least two girlfriends, neither of whom know about his wife and children. Ruh oh.

The Looming Tower will also star Tahar Rahim (THE EAGLE) as Ali Soufan, a young FBI agent on O’Neill’s I-49 anti-terrorism squad who "quickly ascends to O’Neill’s protégé due to his brilliance, as well as his fluency in Arabic and Islam." The upcoming series, which is being eyed for a 2017 premiere, will come to us from Dan Futterman (FOXCATCHER) and Alex Gibney (GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE PRISON OF BELIEF).

This won't be Jeff Daniels' only flirtation with TV in 2017, as he's also set to appear as Frank Griffin in Netflix's Godless, a 6-episode western mini-series which follows Griffin, an outlaw terrorizing the 1880s American West, as he hunts down Roy Goode (Jack O'Connell), his former partner turned enemy. After Roy hides out at a ranch owned by Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery), Griffin's chase leads him to La Belle, New Mexico, a town mysteriously made up entirely of women.