COURTESY BESS PRESS
Daniel Bess started out at Mid-Pac and wound up on Hollywood's hottest show.
JUST in case you aren't feeling sleepy, pull an all-nighter beginning tonight -- they're running all 24 episodes of "24" back-to-back. Daniel Bess — the
‘24’-hour kid from Kaimuki"24": Marathon runs 9 p.m. tonight
through 9 p.m. tomorrow on FX.By Burl Burlingame
bburlingame@starbulletin.comYou remember "24," even though it's so, like, last year. It was the Fox thriller starring Kiefer Sutherland that ran in "real time." The 24 hours that took place on the show took 24 hours to tell, except that real life doesn't have timely commercial breaks (during which, apparently, a person can drive across Los Angeles in the time it takes to sell panty liners or burgers).
And the whole season has just been released on DVD, for those wanting to follow it at their own pace.
One person who won't be watching is the one who lived it. Hawaii-born Daniel Bess, who played Sutherland's daughter's abductor-buddy and maybe future boyfriend, finds looking at his work "painful."
That's true of "most actors," he says, from Los Angeles. "I got such a look at the way a high-end TV show is put together. It's so different from the stage, which I preferred, because you see the whole arc of the performance. On stage, you have time to hone your performance. On TV, an hour after blocking, you're shooting, and it's committed to film and you're on to the next shot. Stage actors are so unprepared for that! And so we generally hate our own performances on TV or movies -- we see all the flaws."
Still, he wouldn't trade the experience, said Bess, who already knows about publishing, since Kaimuki's Bess Press occupied a good-sized part of his parents' home.
"I learned so much about filmmaking. I'm green, so I figured the best thing to do was keep my mouth shut and pay attention. It was enlightening to watch Kiefer work. He'd just do the shot and move on, while we stage actors were agonizing over every detail. That's not the way it works in film. Film is about money -- get the shot, move on, don't hold things up, don't worry about the things you have no control over. That's what I learned from Kiefer."
"24" is now playing in Europe, and Bess says it's even bigger there than here.
"This is pretty big-time, my first real TV job. We shot the pilot and that was fun, but I assumed that would be it. But then it sold, and it became a hot show, not just among viewers but in the business. I was hired for 10 shows -- a friend was hired for five, and in the fifth show, they killed him, so I assumed I'd be dead in 10 -- but I hung around for 18. And my character was still alive when the show ended, so hopefully, they'll bring me back. But I haven't heard from them at all, so ..." and Bess made a long-distance shrug.
In the meantime, he's living on his "24" paychecks and doing "lots of auditioning. I'd rather not say what, unless I've signed on the dotted line."
Bess always knew he'd be an actor, ever since he first went on stage at Mid-Pacific and had a "mini-revelation -- this is what I want to do with my life." He went to New York and did the off-Broadway thing for six years, then moved to Hollywood to test the film waters.
Between acting gigs, he has musical gigs, teaming up with Arnie Saiki, another Hawaii ex-pat in Hollywood, in the rock-blues band Bart & Mule. "Oh, I've always played guitar. But that's just for fun. I'm a professional actor, and that's what I really want to do."
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