“This might be a big mistake but I’d rather be penniless and be proud of something” – Daniel Sharman talks through his motivations for life, career and everything in the new issue of Square Mile magazine. Check out the full interview on Square Mile’s website.
The year is 2014. Plec is showrunner of the hugely popular TV series The Vampire Diaries and its spinoff The Originals. Sharman has a recurring role in the latter’s second season, a role that Plec wishes to upgrade to a series regular. For Sharman, the promotion will mean more screen time, more money, and greater job security in this most capricious of industries. He’s 27 years old. He’s writing to Plec to explain why he has turned her offer down.
The exact copy stays between the parties concerned, but Sharman summarises the letter’s mood music as striking a note of gratitude. “I know this might be a really big mistake but I’d rather be penniless and at least feel like I’m proud of something… If I take this, I just know I’ll regret it.” He respected The Originalsand his colleagues on the show; he understood it would be a dream job for many young actors. It just wasn’t the job for him.
Sharman’s letter was addressed to Julie Plec but he also wrote it to himself. He needed to work out what kind of actor he wanted to be; what kind of person he wanted to be. He had made some progress on the former question: he knew he didn’t want to be an actor who played the enigmatic love interest in supernatural teen dramas.
He’d moved to Los Angeles from London in 2011 after a string of unsuccessful auditions, a soul-destroying succession of nearly but not quites, ‘if it wasn’t for the other guy then you’d be the obvious choice’. LA had brought loneliness and self-doubt and an illegal job in a sushi restaurant and more unsuccessful auditions, 16 billboards that almost had his face on them.
Instead they bore the many different faces of the other guy, who appeared to have followed him across the pond and attained an American accent. (Although sometimes he still had a British accent, which made his success even more galling.)
Circumstances improved. He signed to a talent agency and landed a recurring role in a major supernatural teen TV series – not The Originals but Teen Wolf. Sharman played werewolf heartthrob Isaac Lahey (a teen wolf, not the Teen Wolf) from 2012 to 2014. He left the show after two seasons. “He told me he wanted to try other things,” said showrunner Jeff Davis of Sharman’s departure.
Did those other things include playing the vampire heartthrob Kol Mikaelson? No, not really. But work is work, even if it wasn’t the work he envisaged when he left drama school. (Technically, he played the witch heartthrob Kaleb Westphall who was possessed by the spirit of Kol Mikaelson.) He clocked up a season and he was offered the opportunity to spend the next few years doing something he really didn’t want to do. So he wrote Julie Plec a letter and threw himself into the unknown.
Plec understood. She wrote what Sharman describes as a “lovely email” in reply and had his character cursed to death by his evil older brother. Hey, it’s a vampire show; it would have been easy to bring Sharman back if he’d asked to return, but he never did.
Once the shoot is completed, Sharman and I sit down in a sparse little room on the first floor, empty except for a couple of chairs and a slightly faded chaise longue. It could be the study of a therapist fallen on hard times. We take the chairs.
Sharman is tall, angular, soft spoken. He’s 36 but could pass for a decade younger – there’s something of the university student in his quiet intelligence, albeit a student who spends Saturday night reading improving books in the library rather than knocking back shots at Vodka Revolution.
He isn’t remotely a hardman – hence his casting in A Town Called Malice, an operatic crime thriller created by Nick Love. Love is a writer who’s defied nominative determinism to forge a successful career chronicling violent tales of hard, hard men, usually either football hooligans or gangsters. The Business, The Football Factory, Outlaw, The Firm, The Sweeney – rom-coms these ain’t, aside from Love’s ongoing romance with the definite article.
His parents aren’t actors – mum’s a doctor, dad in local politics – and Sharman doubts he would have found the profession if it hadn’t found him. “I was quite shy, introverted. I don’t think I would’ve done plays at school.” He might have been a painter, gone to art school. He might have gone into business. Who can say? “Maybe I’d have been more… put together. I don’t know. It’s quite a weird thought.”
He makes a remarkably open interviewee. Struggles with addiction, past heartbreaks, feelings of professional inadequacy – subjects that you would not blame him in the slightest for dodging are discussed with disarming honesty and eloquence. This openness will be a legacy of his Two Lads podcast, recorded with the music producer Christian ‘Leggy’ Langdon, the two friends exploring everything from sex to drugs to shame through the prism of their own experiences. When you’ve mused how the failure of a past relationship partially stemmed from your relationship with your mother, and uploaded those musings onto Spotify, chatting to a journalist is practically small talk.
Sharman persevered. He kept landing auditions for major projects; kept reaching the final pair; kept losing out to the other guy. (Remember him?) The loss that hurt the most, the one that ultimately changed his life because it didn’t? That would be getting pipped by Douglas Booth for the 2010 Boy George biopic Worried About The Boy.
He’d all but been promised the role. When his agent phoned with the bad news, the disappointment was so intense it triggered an out-of-body experience. He remembers staring at the carpet, bereft, his agent’s voice in his ear, his mind somewhere else entirely. He couldn’t believe that he’d lost out on another one. “I was going, ‘Yeah, no it’s fine. It’s fine.’ Inside I’m dying of course.”
It proved a pivotal moment. He couldn’t bear another phone call, another staring match with the carpet. In 2011, Daniel Sharman flew to Los Angeles to chase a dream that refused to be caught in London. He wanted a new start in the City of Angels.
His demons flew out with him.
The stuff that was supposed to alleviate the pain only worsened it. For a few months, “I went really dark. Really, really dark.” Then he got sober. “I just hit a point where I went, ‘I’m so tired of lying and I’m so tired of the bravado’. And I wondered what it would look like to not medicate it.”
It wasn’t easy, obviously it wasn’t easy, but sobriety brought about a long overdue confrontation with reality. He began to reconcile the Daniel Sharman in his head with the Daniel Sharman in the mirror. One was perfect; the other happened to exist. He’s been working on the latter ever since.
iu-jitsu is another passion of his. He loves the challenge, the journey from hopeless to not-quite-so hopeless. Improvements so incremental you often don’t even notice them in the moment. “For the first year, you have to accept that you’re just gonna get battered, literally battered. And there’s nothing more humbling and disheartening than someone half your age making you a meat pretzel and you can’t get out of it.
“You think, ‘I’m never gonna get through this, never!’ And then you kind of do.”
See full article here.
Photography: @lee_malone_photography
Styling: @jayhines_ at @theonly.agency
Assistants: @ashleypowell_x & Milique
Grooming: @alexisdayhmu using @yslbeauty and Devines Haircare
Show: Daniel Sharman stars in #ATownCalledMalice, available on @SkyTV from 16 March