Dani – future champion of the world?
Meet the young actor making an impression at Live Theatre
Who is the young man whose assured performances in the play Champion, alongside vastly more experienced cast members, have so impressed audiences?
Take a bow Daniel – ‘Dani’ - Zareie (pronounced ‘Zah-ree’) who plays Azeem, the younger of two brothers in Ishy Din’s new play inspired by Muhammad Ali’s visit to South Shields in 1977.
Director Jack McNamara predicts a bright future. He’s certainly going places, but we’ll come to that.
First, though, where has he emerged from, this young actor – recently turned 19 – who is making his professional debut at Live Theatre as if to the manner born?
He was actually born in Newcastle, to parents who came here as young adults from Iran, and grew up in Highfield, near Rowlands Gill - or as he laughingly puts it, “in the sticks… just a little town in a forest”.
He has set a precedent as the first student on the Theatre Royal’s 10-year-old Project A acting course to be recruited mid-course for a professional production and to be granted leave to take up the opportunity.
“They’ve never let a student do work outside the course because the whole point is you’re there to train,” Dani tells me at Live Theatre on his day off.
“This was a very rare case of right situation, right time because in Newcastle especially it’s rare to have a role like this come along for a young brown ethnic person.
“I think they just bent the rules a little bit.”
Appearance wise, Dani might fit the bill (Azeem is actually of white British/Pakistani parentage) but I think there’s more to it than that. He can certainly act, as we’ve seen; but in person he is eloquent, affable and as driven as a recent school leaver can be.
He wasn’t always so self-assured.
At primary school, he recalls, he enjoyed being in plays and was thrilled on arriving at Whickham Comprehensive to find they did them too. “This is sick,” he thought, as happy teens do. “This is going to be awesome.”
But the reality proved to be rather different, at least at first.
“It turns out theatre isn’t cool. People make fun of you, so in year seven I was going to audition for Oliver! until I heard kids saying awful things.
“They’d say stuff about kids who were into theatre, especially those who weren’t white. So I didn’t do it because I was scared.
“The next year they were doing Grease and I didn’t audition for that either because I was terrified of what people might think.”
In Dani’s mind, it didn’t help that he was physically quite small and also “into quite nerdy stuff, massively into Zelda and Pokémon”. (Even now his Nintendo DS is a frequent companion.)
But in his third year, with a solid group of friends, the school play was Beauty and the Beast and he had a change of heart.
“I was like, you know what, I don’t care – I’m just going to do it.
“So I was a baker in Beauty and the Beast and had about four lines; but saying them on stage was the most fun I’ve ever had. It was amazing and I thought, I’ve got to do this again. Right now!
“And then lockdown hit and everything crashed. I’d just had that experience and then… what the hell?”
The pandemic shattered many dreams but for Dani it was arguably a blessing in disguise.
He became “hyper-fixated” on acting and watched so many ‘how to’ videos that the YouTube algorithm was soon hurling them at him in a deluge.
“Suddenly I knew drama schools were a thing, so I wanna do that. I found agents were a thing. OK, I want one. Stanislavski (the famous Russian theatre practitioner) wrote a book. OK, I wanna read that.
“I found a bunch of monologues online and I’d record myself doing them. I didn’t have a tripod so I’d stack up chairs and books and prop my phone against a water bottle.
“Have you read the play Prodigal Son by John Patrick Shanley (it premiered in New York in 2016 starring Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet)?
“There’s a monologue in it that I love and I recorded myself doing it more than 100 times. I fixated on doing it better and better with no training or direction.
“After lockdown finished, I was like, I’m going at this full throttle because I’ve never been so passionate about anything in my entire life, even though I was only 14.”
If his parents were bemused by their only child – Dani’s father owns barber shops and his mother works in one – his drama teacher was also to face the whirlwind.
“I was like, you’re going to help me with this. I asked her what to do, where to go, who to talk to.
“She told me about a bunch of drama schools and amateur companies, so I started doing youth theatre at Northern Stage and the People’s Theatre.”
From theatrical agent Janet Plater, he got a polite reply to his email – “pretty much the first I’d ever sent” – to the effect that she didn’t sign children.
He got wind of a theatre summer school in London and his parents agreed to contribute living expenses if he could pay the fee, which he did in his spare time by working in one of his father’s shops after learning how to cut hair.
It was in London that he heard about Project A but parked the information, having set his heart on the Guildhall School of Music and Drama which had arranged the summer school.
Towards the end of sixth form he applied and made the final auditions. But then disaster struck. “I was really intimidated because all the others there were way more experienced than me.
“I’d grafted so hard but got rejected and that stung. But that was when I remembered Project A. I was a bit moody but I found out when auditions were and went along.”
He got a place and soon his spirits lifted.
“I completely fell in love with the course. It was not like I thought it was going to be. I met amazing people and was having some of the best training offered anywhere.
“I kid you not, some of the stuff we’ve done in the first six months of Project A is stuff the third years at drama school won’t have done. I know that because I’ve got friends who’ve been.”
A highlight was joining the ensemble of Gerry & Sewell at the Theatre Royal in the autumn. Project A students wore black and scampered about like ninjas.
“It was amazing,” says Dani. “I was so happy to be there.”
The Champion role sneaked up on him. Impressed when Ishy Din addressed Project A – “I always get excited when I see another brown artist in the North East because I feel it’s a bit of a rarity” – he later introduced himself at the Gerry & Sewell press night.
“We had a lovely conversation and I was straight up. I was like, ‘Look, I’ve heard about Champion (tipped off by actor and playwright Elijah Young whom he’d met at Northern Stage) and if I wasn’t bound to the course I would love to audition’.”
Jack McNamara popped in one day and later casually asked if Dani would read some lines for him.
“I was like, OK, yeah, chill, whatever. I didn’t know it was for Champion. I didn’t know he was directing Champion. I wasn’t even thinking about Champion.”
After a Zoom call with Ishy, Dani was called in by Project A course leader Phil Hoffmann and told he’d got the part of Azeem – but not to freak out and to keep it under his hat for 10 minutes.
Recalls Dani: “I think those 10 minutes were the most euphoric minutes ever. I thought, ‘What is going on. This is insane?’
“All the time you get that it’s impossible to do work when you’re on the course and this just happened out of nowhere.”
Worried about the reaction of fellow students, he needn’t have been.
“They were so, so excited. I don’t think I’d ever received so many hugs in the space of a minute.
“We’re very close and very much in the mentality that if one of us wins we all win, and they’re a lovely bunch, so supportive.”
As were his course leaders, saying he could return to his studies later and offering guidance and support should he want it.
Learning that his fellow cast members were to be Christina Berriman Dawson, who he’d seen in the Theatre Royal panto, and Jack Robertson who he’d looked up to in Gerry & Sewell, he was initially “mind-blown”.
“The first day I rocked up, I was super excited but also nervous. I was thinking, I don’t belong in a room with them; but they’re two of the kindest, warmest people as well as talented. They reassured me and gave me such amazing advice.”
Fast forward to opening night and Dani remembers meditating, warming up and then quietly listening to music for an hour before the play started.
“In my head I kept telling myself this is what I’ve trained for. This is what I do. I’m supposed to be here. This is it.
“When it was time to go on stage I took a breath and did it. Then suddenly it was all over and that was probably the first time I felt I belonged and this wasn’t a mistake.”
His parents saw him perform for the first time and told him how proud they were. On press night the Project A cohort gave moral support from the balcony. (I can vouch that it was noisy. I was sitting not far away.)
Janet Plater, says Dani, is now following him on Instagram. Possibly she’d sign him but he says he doesn’t want to waste her time because soon he’ll be away.
Not one to do things by halves, Dani is off in September to New York, having won a scholarship to study at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.
It’s a four year course with campuses in New York and Los Angeles, which is where Dani plans to finish his studies. He has never been to America so ‘excited’ doesn’t come close.
Looking even further ahead, Dani is aiming high.
“I’ve always been an ambitious person and I want to be like the role models and idols I grew up watching.”
These include Andrew Garfield, who he saw in the film Hacksaw Ridge, Jim Carey (The Truman Show), Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game) and both Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt for their roles in Seven.
“The inspiring feeling I had watching them I want to give to someone else. I want to be as big and as good as them.
“And I’d like to be a person that brown or ethnic kids can look at and be like, if this guy can do it then why can’t I?”
Champion runs until Saturday, March 8. Find ticket details on the Live Theatre website.
Can’t wait to see what the kid does. I know he’s destined for greatness.