By Alexandra Wolfe, The Wall Street Journal

Jeff Daniels has a new motto: “Put it on the line or get out.” He has embraced that attitude with his dark new role as a sex offender who meets his victim again 15 years later in the Broadway play “Blackbird.”

Mr. Daniels, 60, has ranged widely in his career, starring in such films as “Terms of Endearment” (1983), “Dumb and Dumber” (1994), “The Squid and the Whale” (2005) and Steve Jobs (2015). Lately he’s done more theater and television, including Aaron Sorkin’s HBO show, “The Newsroom.” In 2009, he was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in the satirical comedy “God of Carnage.”

He has had his ups and downs. After “Dumb and Dumber,” he was in a handful of flops, including a few direct-to-TV movies. Before his comeback in The Newsroom, for which he won an Emmy, Mr. Daniels thought that he would be spending the rest of his career as a singer-songwriter, a job he picked up on the side nearly 20 years ago. “At 60, that’s where I thought I’d be,” he says. He performs folk and blues regularly on his own, singing and playing guitar, as well as with his son Ben’s band. He has sold out 300-seat venues but says that many people aren’t so interested in seeing an actor sing.

Mr. Daniels is now back on stage, opposite Michelle Williams, with “Blackbird” opening for previews on Feb. 5. Theater, he says, is more forgiving of older actors. “You don’t have to be so pretty. You just have to be really good at what you do,” he says. He jokingly curses youth, adding, “They don’t know as much as we do.”

Mr. Daniels grew up in Chelsea, Mich., where he still lives with his wife. They have three adult children. He started acting in high school and continued in college at Central Michigan University, before dropping out to pursue acting full time. He got his first feature film role in “Ragtime” (1981).

At first, Mr. Daniels stuck to dramatic roles, but he grew bored with them. He also wasn’t confident of his prospects as a male lead. “I didn’t look like Richard Gere, I didn’t look like Chris Reeves, and I didn’t have George Clooney’s [ability] to…just sit in front of the camera and the camera loves you,” he says. He thought, “If I’m going to sustain this, I have to try comedy.” That led him to audition for “Dumb and Dumber,” about two bumbling buddies who make their way across the country to return a suitcase full of money. It’s the role he is now most associated with.

His agents warned him not to take the part, arguing that his co-star Jim Carrey would eclipse his performance and that the film would ruin his career. But he ended up with three of the funnier scenes (in one, he sticks his tongue to a frozen pole), and the movie was a blockbuster.

Reports at the time said that Mr. Carrey earned $7 million for his role and that Mr. Daniels made only $75,000. He won’t confirm those numbers, but he says that he did make substantially less than Mr. Carrey. Still, the movie was a big commercial success, and he got a portion of the profits.

When Mr. Daniels’s next few movies didn’t do as well, he decided to devote more of his time to the stage. “I’m the movie guy that’s coming back to the theater because the movie career’s kind of dwindling,” he remembers of the time. “The roles I wanted to do I wasn’t able to do.”

Mr. Daniels had never fully immersed himself in Hollywood. He and his wife decided to stay in Michigan after their second child was born in case his film career never took off. They also have an apartment in New York.

“You go back to the theater because you’re truly appreciated there,” he says. “That happened in my 50s.” He asked himself, “Am I still interested in [acting] enough to keep doing it? Because I’m not going to play the a—hole father of some kid who’s making $5 million and can’t hit his mark—I’m not going to be that actor.”

Mr. Daniels thinks that things have turned around for him lately thanks to his starring role in “The Newsroom.” “There was a period leading up to ‘Newsroom’ where it was scrambling and ‘Let’s just really get better on the guitar because this might be it and we’ll sell the apartment’ ” in New York, he recalls. But he was nominated for an Emmy for his first year on the show and was shocked at the awards ceremony when he won. “I was told to just go for the salmon or the steak,” he says. “Now all of a sudden, you feel like you matter again.”

Another favorite post-rehearsal activity: watching 2016 election coverage, which he finds mind-boggling at times. “It’s not like a bar of soap we’re selling here—we’re selling people,” he says. “So I can go there and forget about ‘Blackbird.’ ”

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