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Tearaway : New Zealand Magazine : danweekes.com
September 2004
  
The girls want him. The guys want to be him. HUNTER ABBEY, 17, interviewed him.
Are
you a fan of Dan Weekes-Hannah?
Yes? - Join
the club. No? - Wait awhile.
He's the new
kid with the shabby unkempt hair, the one that
everyone's talking about. The likeable lank. The
guy that's always yelling across the library, "Yo,
check, one, two, three." Yeah, you'd probably
recognise him, as would millions of people around
the world.
This ruggedly handsome 6th
former has been making waves at home and abroad
since he first appeared on The Tribe, a once
locally produced TV show.
"I've googled
Dan on the net and been quite impressed with the
results," his friend Daniel Matheson tells me.
"He's got a whole army of fans I never knew
about."
"I think his fans are scary," says
Jack Shadbolt. "There's a fine line between
admiration and obsession."
Intrigued, I
thought I'd have a look. Following Daniel's
advice, I googled Dan's name. What I saw was
nothing short of remarkable. Page after page of
dedicated fan clubs and members with names like
'dansgirl247' and 'ved_fan.'
As I
searched through the message boards, a block of
text jumped out at me. Here's what 'danlover4eva'
had to say to 'Emma': "have you go the real
address of him?? If you give it to me ill give you
his ph number. I hope so because he is gorgeous I
want to meet him but im living in the netherlands
which is far away."
Dan doesn't seemed
fazed by all the attention.
"You've gotta
remember, they're on the other side of the world.
They're not about to jump on a plane and come
visit me. If they did, it'd be kinda
funny."
One of his most dedicated fans even
went to the trouble of sending him a birthday
present.
"This poor-as guy in Holland had
to like sell some of his stuff so he could send me
a hard out G-shock watch for my birthday." Dan
still wears the watch every day, carrying a
certain amount of guilt along with it.
Give it to me, Dan
It
all began with a phone call.
"My agent
calls up and tells me she's scored an audition for
this new TV show [The Tribe]. It was for the
character Ved. He's one of the main bad guys.
"There I was in the production office with
the producers. They were saying how well I did,
and that they'd like me for the part. It took me
awhile to register.
"Of course I was
excited - who wouldn't be? My dream had come true.
I gave them all a vigorous handshake and they sent
me on my way."
After several "painful"
years at boarding school, Dan was finally in his
element.
"On the whole, I was enjoying
myself. Forging new friendships, gaining industry
experience, getting free food, ya know, it's easy
to get used to that sort of
lifestyle."
Free food aside, Dan says it
wasn't always plain sailing.
"My first day
on The Tribe was very cold. My costume was a tight
lycra top so there wasn't much insulation. So
you'd just be breathing steam all the time and
sometimes you'd get tired of it, because you have
to be able to switch your concentration on and off
very quickly or stay concentrated all the time and
that kind of zaps you.
"There was this one
director who would come up to me between takes and
say 'Dan, you know what I want - now give it to
me'.
"There was a lot of back stabbing
going on. If you said anything saucy around the
make up ladies it would spread through the cast
and crew like wildfire."
How much was Dan
earning? He remains very tight lipped on the
subject.
"I was earning enough, shall we
say," he says coyly.
Ved's dead,
baby, Ved's dead
Not only did he find
fame and relative fortune in his new job, he also
found a girl.
"I met Jaimee when I moved
into the cast house. I was flirting with her like
there was no tomorrow. We weren't allowed to have
relationships with other cast members, so we kept
the whole thing under wraps. It was hard. Pretty
much everyone knew after awhile.
"I was
real into it at the start, but as my relationship
grew with Jaimee, I became less concentrated on my
work. I didn't learn my lines and I wasn't as
cooperative as usual.
"I was spending a
lot of my time talking to Jaimee, and I didn't
socialize with other cast members."
Things
took a turn for the worse when one day Dan and
Jaimee did a runner.
"We were due for a
big day of shooting and everything was just
getting too full-on. Jaimee asked me if I wanted
to catch a train up to Auckland and get away from
it all. I told her what a bad idea it was and that
we'd be fired instantly.
"But she just
convinced me, ya know. She told me we were main
characters and the producers couldn't afford to
sack us. So we took off early, hopped on a train
and forgot about our worries."
As it turned
out, the producers could afford to sack them.
"Our absence cost the studio upwards of
one hundred thousand dollars," Dan confesses.
"They had to reschedule the whole days shoot. They
fired Jaimee first, and them me soon after."
But to date there has been no shock
wave sent through Dan's multitude of websites. His
character Ved is still on air in Europe. His fans
still send him fanmail, blissfully unaware of
Dan's departure.
"It's kinda weird I
'spose. Oh well, not my problem," he laughs.
So Jaimee and Dan went their separate
ways, and for Dan, it was back from where he came
from - boarding school.
Stay cool
'til after boarding school
Lindasfarne College is a private Presbyterian
boarding school for boys set on a farm in Hakes
Bay. Certainly not a school of his choice.
"They'd wake us up and six in the morning.
We'd have to go for a jog each morning, no matter
what the weather. In the weekends, we'd have to
stay in uniform. We were allowed off school
grounds about twice a year, but we had to get
permission from our parents first."
Dan's
not the sort of person to follow rules unless
there's reason for them.
"I don't have a
hell of a lot of fond memories from my time
there."
Dan wanted out. Anywhere but
boarding school. Initially he was faced with the
choice of either moving to a farm on the outskirts
of Gisborne or staying at boarding
school.
"A lose/lose
situation," he says.
He chose to
face the rest of his school life at boarding
school. Anywhere but Gisborne.
So it was a
matter of putting his head down for three more
years of torture.
"One day I was 'gated'
for having my pants too low. That was when I
realised I could no longer last there. Each day
was getting longer and longer. It was the most
soul destroying place on earth."
Come the
end of his fifth form year, and things started to
look up again. As life at Lindasfarne really began
to take its toll, Dan was thrown a lifeline.
"I was on holiday here in Wellington,
staying at Daniel's place. I was generally
bitching about Lindasfarne and how horrible it
was, when he hinted that I might be able to move
in with him. I was thrilled. It was the best thing
that happened to me in years."
After
everything he endured at Lindasfarne, Dan felt
something needed to be done before leaving, to
bring closure to the whole ordeal. So naturally,
he burnt his old school uniform in a paddock.
"When I saw it going up in flames, it was
kind of uplifting, it set me free in a
way."
Dapper Dan man
It was off to greener pastures. Time for a
change. It didn't take him long to decide that
Wellington High was his best option.
"Well, it was the only co-ed school in
Wellington, so there was nothing to
it."
Arriving just days before the start of
school, it was straight into the deep end for the
fresh-faced farm boy.
"The first thing I
noticed about High was the diversity. I really
like that. You can call all the teachers 'bro' and
they don't ever mind. We're treated like
humans."
"It's also quite slack. For
example, this guy in my English class came in
during an exam, late. He sat down, turned over his
paper and just started drawing circles. After
awhile he just got up and walked out. He wouldn't
get away with that where I came from.
Of
course there is no doubt in my mind that High is
the better school. By far."
So now that's
he's settled in, what's to be said about the real
Dan, the genuine article, the man behind the
fans?
"The Dan that came down from boarding
school was completely different from the Dan I
knew as a kid," Daniel tells me.
"Being a
vegetarian, I was Lindasfarne's equivalent to a
leper - even the 3rd formers gave me shit. Now I'm
here, it's like I've found my own leper colony. I
fit in."
"He told me he used to go for
months without any physical contact before he came
down here," says friend Kash Wall.
"That
would explain why he's hugging people all the
time. I think people as open and fun loving as Dan
should never be confined to such a restrictive
environment."
The come one, come all nature
of High brought out the best in Dan. It wasn't
long before he began rocketing up the Wellington
High celebrity A-list.
"I've got a lot of
respect for Dan," says longtime friend Oliver
Robinson, who's used Dan's acting talents in many
of his short films. "He has a very powerful on
screen presence."
Inevitably, not everyone
is Dan's fan.
"You can't get in a
conversation these days without it eventually
being about Dan," says disgruntled Duncan Fyfe.
"He keeps acting up, saying 'give me
attention' repeatedly until he gets it," says
Nicole Skews.
"He can be quite loud,
but at the same time he's real self-conscious and
he's always going 'oh, sorry' for the most trivial
things. But he's a good lad, our Dan. I don't know
anyone more honest."
This article appeared in the September 2004 issue of TEARAWAY.
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