Daniel Sharman

The Rigor of the Royal Shakespeare Company

Daniel Sharman isn't the typical British actor who lands in Los Angeles chasing fortune out of sheer momentum. At nine years old, he was already under the spotlight with the Royal Shakespeare Company, performing in productions of Macbeth and Henry VI. That academic training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) gave him technical tools that many of his generation's peers simply didn't have.

In 1995, he beat out hundreds of children at an audition to act in The Park under the direction of David Thacker. It wasn't a childish whim. The discipline of the London theater taught him that acting is a physical and mental craft before it is a matter of image. But his move to the big screen would come much later, with the film Immortals in 2011.

That theatrical discipline shaped the way he approaches the set.

On that Greek mythology shoot, he shared the screen with well-known actors. Sharman played Ares and had to undergo grueling physical training for months. It was his first real taste of big-budget productions and digital effects. So he decided his path would not be limited to action movies.

The Price of Fangs and the Fantasy Genre

In 2012, he accepted the role of Isaac Lahey in Teen Wolf. That could have been a trap for his career. Many young actors get stuck in the teen series circuit and never manage to get out. But Sharman decided his character would have an emotional weight that was not originally written into the script.

And the gamble paid off.

His exit from the series in 2014 was a personal decision to seek new challenges in drama. Shortly after, he joined the cast of The Originals as Kol Mikaelson. At this stage, he showed he could handle dense dialogue and period storylines with the same ease as contemporary stories. For him, the key has always been the text.

In 2017, he joined the Fear the Walking Dead universe as Troy Otto. His portrayal of a charismatic, sociopathic young man earned him respect from specialized critics. The character died at the end of the third season after a hammer blow to the head. Or so viewers believed for years.

Back to the Renaissance and Independent Production

In 2018, he took on the challenge of playing Lorenzo de' Medici in the series Medici: The Magnificent. Shooting on real locations in Tuscany allowed him to step away from green screens and return to a more organic style of acting. The production invested nearly 25 million euros per season, and Sharman carried the dramatic weight of the final episodes, filmed in 2019.

He also appeared in Cursed for Netflix in 2020, playing The Weeping Monk. The project aimed to put a fresh spin on the Arthurian legend. However, the series was canceled after a single season due to high production costs and lukewarm reception from global audiences.

Sharman prefers the quiet of small film sets.

Outside of filming, he has explored his side as a producer with the short film The Early Days. He cares about having control over the storyline, not just being in front of the lens. In 2023, he surprised the industry by returning to Fear the Walking Dead to close out his character's arc after a five-year absence.

The eighth season of the zombie series was shot mainly in Savannah, Georgia, during the winter months of 2023. The production used more than 300 extras for the final sequences on the Fort Island set.