Being a stranger in a strange land is tough.  Tough, challenging, but, as I was told, not frightening. Daniel Webber was a labourer in Australia before moving to America to follow his dream of acting. As he speaks about his journey I am filled with anxiety and fear. To leave your home, travel across the world, be surrounded by Americans, and work in an industry known for crushing dreams and destroying spirits, is terrifying! But not to Daniel, who is very zen about the whole thing. He told me he doesn’t let it get to him.

Daniel now appears alongside James Franco as Lee Harvey Oswald, in the Hulu TV series 11.22.63, an adaptation of the thriller by Stephen King. It follows an English teacher Jake, as he travels back in time to 1960s Texas to stop the assassination of President JFK by Oswald (and possibly others).

Daniel has been receiving rave reviews for his performance, something made all the more impressive given his relatively young age, 27, and the fact that this is his first break, aside from Home and Away.

We spoke about the American dream.

 

Daniel: There’s been a lot of sticking with it. Coming from Australia and living in America, you really don’t have an option to fail. When we come here, if Australian or British or anybody, you have to go all in and give it your all.

FAULT: That sounds like a lot of pressure.

You work with it. My focus, because it’s such a competitive market here, it gives you a little bit more fire in your belly. You’ve got to make it work. I think anybody who’s in this profession has to do that. It’s an added challenge coming from Australia.

 

FAULT: How was playing Lee Harvey Oswald?

This role was everything that I could have possibly wanted. I like the opportunity to be challenged. I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I fear not doing a good job. When you get a role, the onus is on you to find it in yourself to be that character, to go to every length that you can to reach into the deepest parts of yourself to figure that out and there is something… that’s scary in a sense, but there’s also there is something very powerful and exciting about it.

 

FAULT: There have been incredibly powerful moments for your character in the show. Is it hard to turn that off when the cameras stop rolling?

Once you finish a shoot and you’ve been working on a role and a character for so long, there is a process of having to detach yourself from it, because the characters carry such a different emotional weight and baggage. There was a little bit of Lee in every audition room I went into for the next month after we wrapped the show. I still hadn’t quite gotten back to Daniel and my own energy. There was more of an aggressive, shut down, defensive thing going on still.

 

FAULT: Do you think Oswald did it?

He was a man very capable of having done it. Whether or not he was aided or there were other people involved, I honestly don’t know. My research was more specifically on him, so I didn’t really go into the conspiracy theories. He has the skill set and the emotional patterns throughout his life which indicate that he is somebody who would easily find motive and reason for it.

 

FAULT: What is it like being written about and reviewed, and to have so much attention on you now?

It’s great to get attention from the show because I’m really proud of what I did. It’s nice for me personally to have played a man like him, and know that I can, and so can have a bit more trust and faith in my own skill set. I always fear not doing a good enough job. With Lee where there was just a mountain of research to get through and a mountain of different things to understand so I could do it.

 

FAULT: Was Hollywood always the dream?

No, not at all (laughs). I didn’t realise acting was a job until I was sixteen. I wanted to be what my Dad was – a tree lopper. I spent time working as a tree lopper. I think I realised early on that as a labourer, you have to work so, so hard and it’s so physically demanding. I’ve done a lot of it in my life – landscaping, tree lopping – so I know what it is to work very hard and to work with my hands for a living. It was something that I didn’t want to have as my career. Acting has been with me the whole time.

 

Words: Chris Purnell 

Press shots: Jessica Castro