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
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A scene from Medium
On screen, local boy Daniel Bess, 28, has played a panicked student, an angry guy, a rookie cop who gets shot his first day at work, a sci-fi mud person and a kidnapper-turned-love interest.
In real life, he’s been a blackjack dealer, a bartender, a plumber’s assistant, a movie concession worker and a P.I. for insurance fraud.
The real-life jobs are ones he has maintained to support himself as he pursues his dream of making it big as an actor.
Bess, whose father, Benjamin “Buddy” E. Bess, owns Honolulu publishing company Bess Press (and who coincidentally is this week’s Business Roundtable contributor), believes the only way to make it is not to have a “Plan B.”
“I don’t have a choice,” says Bess, a Mid-Pacific Institute graduate. “This is what I’m going to do. It may take me 10 years, but hopefully not. To do this, you have to have a thick skin. You have to be up for constant rejection - people telling you you’re not handsome enough, you’re too handsome, you’re not buff enough, you’re too buff, you’re too old, you’re too young ...”
Daniel Bess: an Island boy
at heart
But so far, hard work has paid off for Bess, landing him several guest roles on TV’s hottest shows, including ER
His biggest TV role to date was on the FOX thriller that ran in “real time,” 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland. Bess auditioned and was hired for the pilot episode, and later became a series regular as the kidnapper of Sutherland’s daughter, who eventually becomes her love interest.
Bess was hired for 10 episodes, but stayed for 18.
Now he’s on to the big screen. You can see him in the opening scenes of Steven Spielberg’s latest film Munich, where Bess plays an American gymnast, who, while sneaking back into the Olympic Village after a night of drinking, inadvertently lets Palestinian terrorists into the compound.
“We filmed in Budapest and they flew me out there for a week,” says Bess, who resides in Los Angeles, just outside of Hollywood. “It was really just a 10-hour night shoot for me. Someone like Spielberg has just the fastest crew ever.
They set up for big shots in like five minutes.”
A scene from Gray’s Anatomy
Bess says Spielberg was quite nice - a director who knew exactly what he wanted and would have Bess improvise. In the end, as with most movie footage, the final scene in the film got cut down quite a bit, but Bess still has the first line.
As if working with Spielberg wasn’t enough, Bess also got a call about the same time to meet director James Cameron, who was testing ideas for his next film. Bess worked together with him and Lost
“I don’t know what will come of that, but I’m hoping to have something in the film, whatever it might be,” he says.
The road to get to this point in his career has sometimes seemed like its own dramatic thriller, says Bess.
After high school, he attended the State University New York (SUNY) at Purchase, one of the nation’s top conservatories, and immediately won roles in several off-Broadway productions.
But every actor hits a dry spell, and work seemed non-existent for a while.
“I saw pretty quickly that sitcom stars were starring on Broadway and if you were going to make a living, I really had to get into TV,” says Bess, who knew he wanted to be an actor once he stepped on stage as an eighth-grader. “But there was almost no TV in New York. There was Sex and the City
So Bess took a chance and moved house to Los Angeles, just in time for pilot season.
Sunny California proved to be less than friendly at first.
“A whole bunch of bad things happened
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