Daniel MacPherson on ‘saying yes to things I probably shouldn’t have’

Daniel MacPherson is no stranger to the notion of suffering for his art. “I love a challenge, I thrive on a challenge,” he says. “My career has been built on saying yes to things I probably shouldn’t have, and just giving it hell and seeing what happens.”

He has jumped from helicopters into leech-infested jungles for Strike Back, gone elbow to elbow with a bunch of jockeys at Flemington for The Cup and leapt onto a runaway stagecoach as a bushranger in Wild Boys.

But making Beast, a Rocky-style movie about a washed-up MMA fighter who comes out of retirement for one last shot at the world title, took the challenge to a whole other level.

“I had to act opposite Russell Crowe, I had to fight like [Australian-born UFC featherweight champion] Alex Volkanovski, and I had to look as good as Chris Hemsworth with my shirt off – all in eight weeks, on an indie film budget.”

He also had to train for two years, on and off, before filming had even begun so he could pass muster as a professional in one of the most brutal sports on the planet. And then, once cameras finally started rolling, he had to submit to being punched in the face by a pro.

In fairness, he admits, it wasn’t part of the plan that his on-camera opponent Bren Foster – who holds black belts in four different martial arts – would make such violent contact.

“It was my fault,” says MacPherson, who made his screen debut on the decidedly gentler Neighbours, where he played Joel Samuels for five years from 1998. “I was supposed to have my hands up and I didn’t. What’s the first rule of fighting? Protect yourself at all times. It was all my fault.”

The fight scenes were choreographed by Foster, and he, MacPherson says, “was millimetre perfect”. Not so the leading man. “I was supposed to have my hands somewhere and I didn’t, and I just felt this sharp crack.”

The punch had broken his nose. But not for a moment did MacPherson consider throwing in the towel. “I went, ‘Oh, hang on. I may just need a second’,” he told the crew. “My eyes were watering, I did a lap of the octagon [the fighting cage], and jumped back in. ‘All right, let’s go.’ I really won’t make that mistake twice.”

Nor was it the only injury he suffered. By the time the final fight scenes for the film were being shot in a real MMA stadium (Bangkok’s Impact Arena), “I had a broken nose, I’d torn my adductor [groin muscle] off the bone, I’d fractured my pelvis and they had to cover up my black eyes to put on the fake black eyes and the fake prosthetics”.

In Beast, MacPherson plays Patton James. We meet him as he’s about to enter the ring for a title bout. Crippling doubt has set in and he’s vomiting in the dressing room. Enter Russell Crowe as his trainer, Sammy, with one of the most rousing motivational speeches you’ll ever see.

As opening scenes go, it’s a knockout.

The action quickly flashes forward a decade, and a markedly less-ripped Patton is now working as a fisherman on a deep-sea trawler, being paid a pittance – or not at all, depending on the catch and the whim of the A-hole boat captain – and struggling to keep his family afloat.

He takes his responsibilities seriously, though; he wants to be a good husband to Luciana (Kelly Gale) and support her while she finishes her degree, and he wants to be a good father to their son. Fighting would offer a big pay day and make all of that so much easier, but he’s promised Luciana not to go back in the ring, because it’s too dangerous. Of course, it’s a promise he’s destined, eventually, to break.

Beast (which had been called The Beast In Me – after the Johnny Cash song that’s covered in the closing credits by Russell Crowe and his band Indoor Garden Party – until a certain Netflix series starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys came along) may not win prizes for originality. But it could snaffle a few for the unflinching flesh-on-flesh realism of its fight sequences.

MacPherson was working on the war movie Land of Bad on the Gold Coast in 2022, along with Crowe and Liam Hemsworth and his brother, Luke, when that film’s writer, American David Frigerio, said he had another project that might be of interest.

“He gave me the script [for Beast] and said, ’I’ve watched you and Russell work over the last two weeks, and you’d be perfect for these characters I’ve got in this MMA film,” MacPherson recalls. “I read the script and it was fantastic, except it was set in Buffalo, New York, and I didn’t know the first thing about what life was like working in a steel factory in Buffalo, New York.

“And then Tyler Atkins came on as director and Tyler didn’t know much about what life was like in Buffalo, New York, either. But we did know a lot about growing up in places like Newcastle and Wollongong.”

But while Atkins – the winner of the first season of The Amazing Race Australia, who made his feature debut with the semi-autobiographical surf movie Bosch & Rockit in 2022 – found plenty to like in the script, he also saw its shortcomings.

“I turned it down a couple of times because it was originally set in America, and obviously there have been stories like this before,” he says.

The breakthrough came after he spoke with Luke Hemsworth, whom he calls “one of my dear friends” (he was the adult lead in Bosch & Rockit and has a small role in Beast) about “certain issues” he had with the story. “And he told me, ‘you’re never going to get a script that you absolutely love, but as a filmmaker, if you can see things you like, you can start injecting them’. And that was just a really good a-ha moment for me.”

With MacPherson on board, Atkins started retooling the story, moving the action to Port Kembla. And when Crowe committed, the Oscar winner gave the script a pass of his own (enough to earn a co-writer credit).

Atkins infused the story not just with a strong sense of Australianness, but also with the kinds of themes he was passionate about. “I’m pro-relationship, I’m pro-family, pro-forgiveness, and pro-men chasing their dreams … I worked really hard to shape a story that could show true masculinity.”

In this era of the so-called manosphere, Atkins knows any talk of masculinity can be problematic. “It’s a slippery slope,” he says. “But we have to be able to have conscious discussions about what a man is.

“To me, masculinity is not a man who can break down a wall,” he continues. “Masculinity is a man who can have his heart broken and rebuild and come back stronger and better. There’s a big push in this world that’s toxic masculinity, but no one ever says anything about good male role models. And I wanted to really show the world – and Dan was a big part of this – what a true man is.

“A man is someone who can grow and have an honest life and doesn’t fuck people over, is a responsible father and a great husband, who works hard. I’m talking about men that are heart-centred and understand emotions and are emotionally intelligent and show up.”

And know how to land a punch, when necessary.

Atkins, who lives in Byron Bay with his wife and daughters, is a slender, gentle, spiritual soul. But he was drawn to the world of fighters because “they’re men who can protect communities, protect women and protect children from things coming into their town or their village, they can step up and say, ‘no, that’s wrong’.”

He’s met plenty of fighters, he says, and the best of them “are not out there smashing people. They’re actually very beautiful people. It’s a meditation, and they’re very grounded. If push comes to shove, they’ll stand up and protect people. And that, to me, is a real, true man. He doesn’t live in that place, but he goes to that place if he needs to, then he comes back to being vulnerable and centred, and can still have these heart-to-heart talks that men need to learn how to have.”

That’s a lot of weight to put on a fight movie, perhaps. And there were times when the weight became almost unbearable for Atkins.

“Movies have their own soul, and you’ve got to follow what the film wants,” he says. “This film was about an underdog who wins a world title, and it put us through our own world title. It kicked the shit out of us.”

The night after he’d called wrap on the first block of filming – two weeks in Sydney with Crowe, with a five-week break before flying to Thailand for the big fight scenes – Atkins collapsed in his hotel room. He had crippling vertigo, something he had never before in his life experienced.

“I couldn’t stand up. My whole world was spinning like a washing machine. I vomited everywhere. I fell over. My wife had to drive me to the hospital.”

For a period, he thought he’d have to step away from the movie he’d been working on for four years. “When you have vertigo, you can’t really think,” he says. “I couldn’t walk straight, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t even think. But the day I left for Thailand was the day my vertigo went away, after four weeks.”

Money was an issue too; three times the film started, only to stop because of financing problems.

“That happens to almost every movie,” says Atkins, who was a week into filming on the third attempt when an investor dropped out, meaning a couple of million dollars had to be found overnight (amazingly, it was). “As a director, you have to be adaptable.”

The stop-start wasn’t all bad for MacPherson, though. “The movie gods did me a favour,” he says, laughing. “When we were set to shoot the first time around (in mid-2023), I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t have the stature or the gravitas or the technical ability to play a beast of a fighter, all the things that he needed.”

By the time cameras rolled in late 2024, he says, “I was the leanest, the most dehydrated, the most shredded I’d ever been”.

He’s proud of the physical work he did, but equally so of the performance in its broader sense. “There’s a constant balance between vanity and aesthetics and functionality, and we walked that line,” he says. “We had to make it technically proficient and engaging, as well as intensely compelling from a story point of view. And we had to elevate it into the realms of cinematic entertainment.”

And as with Atkins, MacPherson sees plenty of substance beneath the genre shell.

“I loved that Patton was a really old-school, traditionally moral man, to a fault,” he says. “His moral compass was extremely set and his view of the world was right-and-wrong, good-and-bad. I wanted to explore that on screen because it’s potentially a dying part of masculinity, perhaps.”

As a man in his mid-40s who’s experienced parenthood, divorce, caring for his own parents, MacPherson says, “I also resonated with a man having lost his sense of purpose and identity under the weight of responsibility that comes at that time in life.”

In Patton, he saw a man who was trying to rediscover his own identity while simultaneously owning his responsibilities and moral code.

“When I unlocked that part of Patton James, and that part of the story,” he says, “the depth and the meaning and my own purpose in what I wanted to do with the film was really unlocked.

“It tested me and challenged me in every area of my skill set,” he adds of the role he’s lived with since 2022. “It’s by far the performance I’m most proud of in my career.”

Beast is in cinemas from April 23 and streaming on Stan (which is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead) from May 26.

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