No Plan B

... It’s all or nothing in Hollywood for Daniel Bess. Daniel Bess turns away from the family publishing business to pursue his passion for acting, something he felt the first time he stepped onto a stage for a school play

Wednesday - January 04, 2006
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one after another,” says Bess. “The day I drove in, my grandfather died, but my girlfriend at the time and I had to find a place to live in five days so I didn’t get to go to the funeral.”

When he finally did find a place to live, the next week he got robbed at gunpoint walking home from work. If that wasn’t bad enough, Bess and his girlfriend went through a breakup, and he got hit by a car.

“I thought maybe I should just go back to New York to recuperate and do some summer theatre there,” says Bess. “But at the last moment I got the guest star on the pilot that would later be called 24.”

While ratings were slow in the beginning, 24 eventually became a cult hit shows, even bigger in Europe than it is in the United States.

“Because of that show, I was able to have enough cash to get started, and casting directors started to know that I was in 24 and it helped me get other roles,” says Bess.

But in 2003, things seemed to dry up again. Bess started focusing on acting classes, knowing that his theatre training hadn’t really prepared him for the world of TV.

“24 was my first time being in front of a camera on a professional set. I was terrified at first, so it was a good thing the show was all about being terrified,” he laughs.

“On stage, you have four weeks to prepare and figure out what a moment might be,” he says. “I really didn’t know how to prepare emotionally for film. When you first start you are so conscious of everything. There’s 40 to 50 people on set and they’re all like, ‘Hurry up, hurry up!‘and they had a tape measure in your face when you’re trying to get all emotional for a scene.”

Through his acting classes, Bess learned to take everything he had on stage, tone it down for the camera and feel comfortable doing it. He also learned a few tricks, such as if the camera is on the left side of his acting scene partner’s face, he’ll stare into his or her left eye so he’s not darting back and forth trying to look at both eyes, which can get distracting when your face appears larger than life on the screen.

When the acting gigs were scarce, that’s when Bess also started to pursue his other passion: music.

“I really started writing songs and playing what I’d call a mix of Hawaiian, country and blues,” says Bess, who sang in the Honolulu Boy Choir as a child, and later played in a rock band called Poor Excuse in Italy.

“I’m currently working on putting together a band, but I’m also working on putting out a solo CD.”

The CD, tentatively titled Hawaiian Country, is slated to be released this summer in Los Angeles.

Bess decided after six months of no acting jobs, that he’d make a return to the theatre.

“I really needed to get back on stage,” he says. “Filming for TV is pretty unsatisfactory artistically if you have a small role. You’re only there for a couple days.”

Bess got a role in the production of Pera Palas, where he played a gay Turkish man coming home to face his parents with his lover.

“It was hard because I had to have this thick Turkish accent,” says Bess. “But because I started working on something that really challenged me, everything started to pop.”

Continuing in the grueling auditioning process, Bess won more TV roles, Munich and the meeting with Cameron. He’s also in the film Constellation, opposite Gabrielle Union, now making the rounds at film festivals. He’s also in two episodes of a mid-season replacement show What About Brian, produced by Lost and Alias creator JJ Abrams, and is putting together a play called Ned & Jack.

“There’s a lot of ‘wait and see’ right now,” says Bess, whose favorite actors include Daniel Day Lewis, Morgan Freeman and Meryl Streep. “Sometimes it takes doing three years of great auditioning for somebody to notice you. It’ll pay off down the road but you have to keep your nose to the grindstone. And auditioning is hard because you go out on sometimes three a day - auditions that could change your life - and you barely have time to read the script, you don’t know your lines ... it took me a good five years to figure out how to do it.”

Bess says he’s focusing now on getting his album done and preparing for the pilot season which starts this month.

“I’d like to get my own show or at least get one of the leads that won’t just get killed off,” he says.

“It feels like the road for me has been two steps forward, one step back. Every time you get a break, you go through another hard period. Everyone is always asking me, ‘What’s this going to be? When is this going to happen?’ and there are just so many variables, you don’t know. It’s about being really stubborn and just sticking your head back up.”

Bess has seen a lot of his actor friends go by the wayside, giving up acting for family and a steady paycheck.

“If you want to make it you have to be willing to sacrifice a lot,” he says.

“You have to sacrifice any control over where your life is going to go until you make it big. From here to a year, maybe I won’t work at all, or maybe I’ll be cast in the next Lost or a giant movie. I don’t want the fame necessarily that goes with being a big star. I only want to be a big star so I can have control over my life and say what I want to do and when.”

Bess says he will always go back to the theatre, however. “That’s what really keeps me alive. To survive financially, I have to get the TV shows, but to survive emotionally, I have to do theatre and my music.”

Bess has enough of a track record that when people look at his resume, they know he’s done some good things, but because he didn’t grow up in the industry he says it took him years to get over being intimidated by the Hollywood-it’s-all-about-image thing.

At 5 feet 11 inches with dark-brown wavy hair, piercing blue eyes and a smile that charms, Bess has the look of a leading man, but certainly not the ego to go with it.

“I guess I come across as the more brooding type,” he says. “I was great at comedy in college and I’m good at doing all kinds of accents, but for some reason since I’ve been in Los Angeles, I’ve only been cast in dramatic roles.”

Bess is still a Hawaii boy at heart, noting how he’ll never really get into the Los Angeles scene and prefers to stay home and hang out with his friends and girlfriend, teacher Hailly Korman, who is also a Mid-Pacific Institute grad.

Bess also tries to come home at least twice a year to visit with family and make daily runs to Makapuu Beach and Portlock.

He’s the oldest of three children - brother David, a musician with his own band in Iowa, and sister Sarah Ann, who just graduated from college. His mother, Ann Rayson, is a professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and she and Buddy started Bess Press the year Daniel was born.

The family lived in Kailua and then Palolo and currently resides in Kaimuki, though Daniel spent his sophomore year in high school living with the entire family in Italy.

Eventually, says Bess, he’d like to move back to Hawaii to raise a family. And though his father would probably like one of the kids or grandkids to take over the family business, Bess says his father knows how committed he is to acting.

“To do this, you have to make sure this is what you want to do for the rest of your life,” says Bess.

“I can’t explain why, but I just knew once I stepped on that stage in the eighth grade that it was the most fun I’d ever had in my life.”

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