By DANIEL MACPHERSON CAN sure tell a story. He knows how to set a scene and cast himself as the kind of willing, starry-eyed protagonist you want to root for. Yes, he’s an actor and does this for a living, but not everyone can paint a picture with words the way the 45-year-old from Cronulla can.
It probably helps that his has been a career both gilded and snake-bitten, one given as much to giddy highs and easy paydays as it has been to dead-ends and false dawns, which in turn precede new flickers of hope. All of it, should his new film, Beast, about a washed-up MMA fighter, blow up the way many think it might, would swiftly be relegated to footnotes, as MacPherson becomes that most deceptive of Hollywood tropes: the overnight success story.
MacPherson and I are sitting at a table in Sydney’s Australia Square on a blustery morning in March. Around us, city workers shuffle past, make private phone calls or sneak a discreet vape before returning to the atomised existence of their CBD offices. This is the third time in 20 years I’ve interviewed the Aussie actor and the last I left him, he was contemplating a move to LA to pursue his acting dream. “It’s been a while,” he says, upon greeting me, before putting a friendly arm over my shoulder.
Before the big move, MacPherson’s career had appeared rather effortless, particularly if you reduce it to broad brushstrokes. Chubby kid gets into triathlon, before being spotted by an entertainment talent scout at 16. That serendipitous meeting sees him land a gig on Neighbours. He becomes a teen heartthrob, before relocating to the UK and securing a role on The Bill. He returns to Australia and finds work on local dramas and hosting reality shows, while knocking out triathlons in his spare time. Roles come easily; opportunity always knocks. He has it all . . . except the thing he truly wants: a Hollywood career.
Our protagonist faces a choice: stay here in his comfortable bubble – yes, the big fish, small pond conundrum. Or go to LA where nobody knows him, or cares that he’s a seasoned actor with umpteen credits to his name. To casting agents, he’s just another handsome, sun-kissed actor from Down Under. Some of them won’t even shake his hand. I’ll let MacPherson pick up the tale from here.
“For a long time, it felt like I was swimming from Australia to America, and for 99 per cent of that journey, you couldn’t see either shore and you didn’t know whether you were making any headway or whether you were going forwards or backwards or sideways or whatever,” says the actor, who’s joined Esquire today to help showcase IWC’s latest range of Pilot and Ingenieur watches.
“And then finally I got my first American job [as a guest actor on a show called The Shannara Chronicles with Austin Butler] in 2016 and it was like, Oh, I can just see a bit of sand at the bottom. And then I got another guest role and a show in Chicago for Fox. And it was like, Oh, I can start to see the land and begin to pull myself forward. And then I got Strike Back and it was like, Oh great, I’ve finally swam from Australia to America into a lead role.”
And now, he’s starring opposite Russell Crowe in a gritty local production that could make his name in the States for good and change the perception of him here in Australia. So, where is he now in that metaphorical swim across the Pacific? Is he on the Santa Monica sand? MacPherson’s face cracks into a fierce grin that’s only become more disarmingly crinkled over the years by greying stubble and wizened lines around his sparkling green eyes. “Hopefully I’ve got a few flags on the hills up off the beach,” he says.
Like I said, a storyteller. And if you needed further proof, note the careful use of that most powerful of narrative propellants: hope.
It felt like I was swimming from Australia to America... and didn't know if [I was] making any headway."
BEING DANIEL MACPHERSON was a pretty good way to make a living back in the early 2010s. MacPherson was close to a household name here in Australia, hosting Dancing with the Stars after previously starring in hit Channel 7 drama, City Homicide. When he wasn’t acting or presenting, he was competing in triathlons. He’d competed in the Hawaiian IRONMAN world championship in 2009, clocking 10:25, and won the amateur division of the LA Triathlon, which meant he could have got his US pro card.
Outwardly, he was doing a lot of things well. It turned out that wasn’t quite good enough. “I was completely half-arsing every audition I was going to,” MacPherson says. A growing sense of restlessness reared its head while he was competing in the Challenge Roth triathlon, in Germany, in 2014.
“It was about halfway through the marathon,” says MacPherson, looking back. “It was hot. It was windy, my nutrition was wrong and the wheels started to fall off and I suddenly just thought, Why am I still doing this? And the epiphany at that point was, What do I have left to do in this sport that is taking 25 or 30 hours a week of focus and energy away from my career, that I haven’t already done?”
He quit the race on the spot. A tad dramatic, you might say, but better in terms of the grand narrative. He proceeded to get some IV fluids before telling his then partner, Zoë Ventoura, who’d been waiting for him at the finish line, that he wasn’t just withdrawing from the race, he was quitting the sport. “She said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I was like, ‘I’m not doing this anymore. I’m going to put all this energy into my career’.”
I was completely half-arsing every audition I was going to."
The jack-of-all-trades had got jack of all the trades. “It was that conscious decision, All right, let’s pick one thing and attempt to do it exceptionally, rather than just do a bunch of things really well.” He invokes Bono: “‘Very good is the enemy of great’. That kind of sat with me. I was like, Okay, let’s really dig down on one thing.“
Of course, anyone who jumps from a position of comfort and security to one where you don’t know where your next pay cheque is coming from will face some anxious moments. What have I done? What was I thinking? It didn’t help MacPherson that his golden run of roles here in Australia had made him ill prepared for the calibre of competition he would face in Tinseltown.
“I think things had come so easily in Australia for so long that I actually didn’t realise how competitive America was and how talented actors, writers, directors and creatives are in Los Angeles,” he says.
This is perhaps where his background in triathlon came in handy. “As we know, competition is something that I’ve always thrived on,” he says, smiling. Where some actors go to LA and quickly realise it’s not for them – they don’t like hiking, which rules out treks up Runyon Canyon, don’t like going to the gym, nixing sessions at Muscle Beach, and “don’t like sitting in a room of 25 people that look exactly like me trying to win a job offer,” MacPherson says. Him? He begins to laugh. “That sounds like a perfect day for me.”
He would land his first job, on The Shannara Chronicles, three months after stepping off the plane and has worked consistently on big–budget US streaming shows ever since. He’s also made some well-regarded sci-fi films here in Australia with director Shane Abbess, including Infini and The Osiris Child, and worked on some local projects with Russell Crowe (more on those later).
And now Beast, the film that could, as they say, change everything. Whether it’s the résumés of the cast and crew involved, the gritty, visceral punch the film packs, or the guiding omnipotent hand of narrative mechanics, all of MacPherson’s work to date now feels like it’s been leading towards this film, this moment.
“I feel like Beast is the culmination of 27 years of lessons,” MacPherson says. As it would turn out, those lessons would be drawn not only from his career but his personal life, something that bleeds into just about every frame of the film.
PATTON ‘THE GENERAL’ JAMES is unleashing a guttural roar during a pivotal scene towards the end of Beast. He’s had the shit kicked out of him by his opponent, Xavier Grau (Bren Foster), a real-life martial artist, who’s responsible for choreographing the film’s stupendous fight scenes. James’ body is a bloody wreck, but his eyes are blazing with adrenaline. In a preview screening, director Tyler Atkins joked that MacPherson “looks soft” now, compared to the character on screen.
“I didn’t realise how deep down the rabbit hole I’d gone until he [Atkins] said, ‘Look how hard that guy on screen is’.”
He went deep because that’s what he does now. He also recognised the gift he’d been given. “It’s not every day in your career that Russell Crowe backs you into the lead in a fight movie,” he deadpans.
He and Crowe have some history, after working together on the Oscar winner’s directorial debut, Poker Face (2021), and again in TV series Land of Bad, in 2024. What’s it like working with Australia’s unofficial bard and the man with perhaps the deepest vocal register in the country? As you might expect, MacPherson is effusive, likening the experience to a tennis rally. “Sometimes on jobs you hit the ball as hard as you can over the net and you’re never quite sure if it’s going to come back,” he says. “It’s not the case with people like Russell. You know it’s coming back with spin and there’s never going to be two shots the same. It’s just up to you to get racquet on ball and get it back. I feel like Russell and I were having some pretty interesting rallies on Beast.”
Of course, playing an MMA fighter was an arduous physical assignment, requiring the former cardio king to put on lean muscle and live like a fighter. “There’s this enormous physical challenge in making everybody in the world believe that you’re an MMA fighter,” he says. “I was doing my own training. I was doing my own washing. I was doing my own cooking. Everything was a grind but that’s what it needed.”
MacPherson took himself to Thailand twice to work out in training camps, not initially revealing he was an actor preparing for a role. “I was training at a gym called Superpro in Koh Samui with a bunch of elite semi-professional fighters,” he says. “Eventually they asked why I had so many Instagram followers. I had to come clean, but they weren’t holding back in sparring. I’ll never forget the first time I got properly choked out and had a mild panic attack on the mats. I had to fight every instinct in my body not to quit on the spot. There was this physiological response of having the breath and the blood choked out of you by someone you don’t know. It was a lesson.”
The other reason MacPherson committed so fully to the role was because he could see parallels in his own life with Patton James’ struggle to define himself outside the Octagon and the weight of responsibility the character feels to provide for his family. “For me, that was turning 40, facing fatherhood, moving back to Australia, going through a pandemic, navigating divorce and the writers’ and actors’ strikes,” he says. “That was one of the most challenging periods of my life personally and it took every ounce of knowledge and digging into the tool set that I had to get through that period intact.”
Beyond his personal connection to the character, in Patton James MacPherson saw a man trapped by the invisible, sometimes self-imposed bars of midlife malaise, a predicament often precipitated by divorce and intensified by the absence of support networks. “As we know, one of the greatest global epidemics is men of my age or younger not being able to find a way out and taking their own lives,” MacPherson says solemnly. “When I linked that back to this role and this character, it became, for me, a love letter to those men who are going through that struggle now. That’s up on screen. You’re seeing a guy that’s going through that and choosing to fight for his identity and for his purpose.”
In preview screenings, he says, the film has resonated with veterans and former sportsmen who’ve been affected by the struggles brought on by seismic life changes. “For me personally, and I know for many others, it is intrinsically a really tricky time of life.”
I will never forget the first time I got choked out."
LONG BEFORE LIFE got tricky, MacPherson was a Cronulla kid, who grew up in the surf – a “sunny, salty little surfy kid”, he says. He was also an overweight one, he adds, telling me with a smile that “the MacPhersons are a big bunch”. He was the last kid picked in school sport, something he now looks on as helpful. “That probably still has a nice little sprinkle of motivation,” he says. “‘Fuck you’ is a great motivator if you’ve got the measure right.”
His big break was the kind of fortuitous free kick ambitious teenagers dream about. He was stewarding at a triathlon after bouts of glandular fever and chickenpox meant he couldn’t compete. Alongside him on the course was an entertainment talent scout, who asked the stricken teen if he was interested in acting or modelling, before proceeding to give him his number. Not surprisingly, MacPherson, never called but three weeks later the scout called the family house and invited him to do some acting. Since he still couldn’t compete in triathlons due to his illnesses, he decided he may as well give it a go.
He was sent off to acting classes where he was objectively terrible. “I remember they said, ‘You’re very raw, but there’s something we can work with’.” After attending a couple of auditions, he was offered an 18-month contract on Neighbours, the news arriving the night before his HSC economics exam.
“I just was in a daze,” MacPherson recalls. “I went and washed my parents’ cars. Mum was like, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m just washing your cars’. Why? I don’t know. But this kind of weird sliding–doors moment had happened and suddenly the HSC kind of didn’t matter anymore.” His last two exams went “out the window”, he says. “I think I snuck into Northies underage on the weekend and turned up to my 3-unit English exam on the Monday hungover after drinking fire engines and cowboys with my mates. That was the last I cared about the HSC.”
He drove to Melbourne in a second-hand Mitsubishi Magna, dreaming of one day owning a Holden EH station wagon. “I never got it. Maybe I like the idea more than actually lugging around a late-’60s classic car, but I’m still on the lookout.”
There’s a good chance he always will be. Maybe the pursuit of excellence inherently means you’re not actually meant to achieve your stated goals. “Looking back now, I always valued improvement,” says MacPherson. “I valued growth. And so, I was always looking ahead thinking, How can I be better? How can I work at a higher level? How can I challenge myself on a bigger stage? I’m probably still doing that.”
Perhaps then, MacPherson, the storyteller, doesn’t get his Hollywood ending. Or if he does, the question soon arises, what’s next? Where’s the next soul-wringing role? The next proverbial Pacific Ocean to paddle across? The next blank page to fill.
Beast is in cinemas from April 23.
Credits:
Words: Ben Jhoty
Photography: Jesse-Leigh Elford
Styling: Grant Pearce
Grooming: Lucy Jackson
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