For Jeff Daniels, Charlie Croker, a flamboyant Atlanta billionaire on a wild ride to bankruptcy, is not just “A Man in Full” in Netflix’s new limited series – he’s easily among the most challenging characters in the actor’s career.

To start, Daniels, 69, had to forget everything he’s been taught to bring Tom Wolfe’s wild and wooly Croker to blazing life.

“I read the first episode and then I read (Wolfe’s) book. Any time when it’s based on a book, you’ve got a great source,” he began in a Zoom interview. “Then you go into it knowing it’s going to be a big performance.

“He’s larger than life. He’s the star of his own show and everybody he meets is his own audience. He assumes everyone loves him as much as he loves himself.

“That’s where it starts. And then you poke a hole in that and let the air out — and he does a freefall back down to earth over the course of the six episodes.

“It’s fun. It’s a challenge to be that larger than life in a close-up. That’s not what they teach you in ‘Star School’ where ‘Less is more’ is what they teach you.

“So I had to come in where more is more and then also hang a Southern accent on it,” Daniels laughed. “That was just an exaggeration on anything you might actually say. But that’s what Tom Wolfe wrote! That Charlie’s accent at times, you couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“So I had free rein to just blow up that performance. And I had actors around me, that went with me. We had such a ball.”

Among Croker’s eye-opening encounters, the first is when, without any urging, he goes into a rattlesnake’s terrarium, grabs the hissing reptile and strangles it with his bare hands.  Is he nuts!?

“Well, certainly the people who are with him at the time believe so. Charlie is a man’s man — and a man’s man would have a private jet. A man’s man would own seven skyscrapers. And a man’s man would pick up that snake. That’s all Charlie needs to know.”

Did the prosecutor’s seizure of Charlie’s private jet make Daniels think of Donald Trump?

“I know Wolfe based the character on two or three people in Atlanta. So that wasn’t Trump.

“But the fact is that Trump is having some issues with how much he was actually worth versus what was actually in the bank — and Trump’s not the only one to have overextended himself. But he certainly was on television, that’s for sure.

“That just makes the show, you know, all the more relevant.”

“A Man in Full”  streams on Netflix May 2