American actor Jeff Daniels is impressed by how Iceland has preserved Höfði House, which stands almost exactly as it was during the historic summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev held in Reykjavík 40 years ago, in 1986.
Daniels portrays Reagan in the newly released film The Brink of War, which has the two-day Reykjavík Summit as its centerpiece. He spoke with Tina Jøhnk Christensen about making the movie in Iceland.
“It was a shrine to peace,” says Jeff Daniels via zoom from New York, referring to Höfði House, the site of the 1986 Reykjavík Summit.
In The Brink of War, Daniels portrays US President Ronald Reagan as he meets with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and he is impressed by how the small, rustic house called Höfði (Icelandic for ‘headland’) stands almost exactly as it did 40 years ago.
“The fact that they just preserved the house as it was, told me how much they cared about what happened,” the American actor says about the significance of the historic event to Iceland. “It was like a shrine to peace – or an attempt at world peace – that happened in Reykjavík, in that house. The entire country is proud of having that location.”
Höfði House is located on the picturesque shore of Reykjavík. It was built in 1909 for a French consul, using wood imported from Norway. The white-painted house later became the home of Icelandic poet Einar Benediktsson, and it also housed the British Embassy at one point. Since 1958, it has been owned by the City of Reykjavík and used as a venue for formal city receptions. Its most significant claim to fame is the historic summit between the two world leaders in 1986.
“When we went in there the first time, it was like walking back into 1986,” says Daniels about the house. “I was really impressed with the pride that the city of Reykjavík, and the country of Iceland, took in what happened in that house in October, 1986. That house was preserved. It felt like a museum.”
Daniels was excited that The Brink of War, which was written and directed by Michael Russell Gunn,could be shot on location. The shoot mostly took place in Höfði House itself, and this is where Daniels spent most of his time in Iceland.
“As an actor, you take whatever is given to you, and if you can help trick yourself into thinking you’re the character, or you’re in the room that the character was in, you use it,” he says about portraying the former American president. “The fact that this was the actual house, the actual room, the actual chair, means you don’t have to imagine anything. It is the actual chair that he sat in.”
Legend has it that Höfði House is haunted, and that the British Embassy eventually relocated because of this. Apparently the British ambassador met a ghost, which became known as ‘The White Lady’, and informed the British Foreign Office that evil spirits haunted the place and that a move was a necessity.
Daniels, however, didn’t experience any ghost sightings while shooting at Höfði House.
“I didn’t,” he says matter-of-factly. “But it’s like in a church. You walk into a church, especially an older church. There’s a presence. You can imagine a presence.”
The summit happened after an unexpected invitation from Mikhail Gorbachev during the Cold War, when Reagan and Gorbachev were political rivals, and the American president accepted it despite decades of rivalry and hostility between the two countries.
“There’s a presence that something happened here, and that it was important. And you try to imagine hearing their voices, or hearing the voices of the people around them and someone asking: ‘Mr. President, can you come to this room, please?’ And you start to imagine what it was like. What they heard and what they saw in 1986. And then you sit in the chair and try to let go so that you can kind of almost channel him. From the inside out.”
In The Brink of War, “I failed…” are the first words heard from Reagan (as portrayed by Daniels) as he gazes over the turbulent waves of Faxaflói bay. The meeting is almost over and US Secretary of State George Schultz, portrayed by J.K. Simmons, advises the president to give it one more shot.
We then see him in flashback at the negotiating table with Gorbachev, played by British actor Jared Harris, as the two men start to build trust.
“As divided as the world is now, as dangerous as the world is now, it was just as dangerous then – perhaps more so, because there was no shield,” explains Daniels of the situation in 1986. “So Reagan and Gorbachev met at a time that was as dangerous as it is now. It was just the two of them. There were 70,000 nuclear missiles pointed at each other with nothing to stop either one of them. Mutually assured destruction.”
Over the summit’s two days in Iceland, Reagan and Gorbachev came very close to an agreement on sweeping reductions to their nuclear arsenals, but as Gunn’s script shows, it was not an immediate success. Despite the fact the meeting didn’t lead to a final resolution then and there, it paved the way towards the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that was signed in 1987 – and the eventual end of the Cold War.
“Is it possible to do that today?” he says, repeating my question. “I don’t know. But it was seemingly impossible to do it in 1986. And these two guys began the work that would end up being the end of the Cold War. They got there.”
Daniels has played men who are closely associated with American politics in various TV productions, such as news anchor Will McAvoy in The Newsroom, and former FBI director James Comey in The Comey Rule. However, he was not as focused on the comings and goings of American politics 40 years ago, when the Reykjavík Summit took place. At that time he was 31 years old, still living in New York, and about to move his wife and two-year-old son back to his home state of Michigan.
“I barely remember the meeting,” he admits. “When you’re young, and a young actor focused on trying to get your next job, that’s your focus. So I wasn’t as aware of what was going on, and the danger of it all. It certainly didn’t have the impact on me that, say, 9/11 did. It was a meeting between the two world leaders, and it was in the news. Had it not gone well, had it ended up in ‘Oh my God, there are nuclear weapons coming at us’ – that would have gotten everybody’s attention, but I was uninformed until later in life.”
At the time, the news wasn’t one click away on the internet as it is today, he adds. But he appreciates the lessons he learns because of his job.
“That’s the beauty of acting though. That suddenly, you get an opportunity to play a moment in history like this one and you get to go to school on it. You get to understand where we are now because of that.”
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Photos from the set of The Brink of War provided by Angel Studios.
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Tina is an award-winning journalist and author from Odense, Denmark. Since 2013, she has been a voter for the Golden Globe Awards. Tina is based in Los Angeles and is a regular visitor to Iceland, which she loves. She covers film-related subjects for Icelandair.
