For Daniel Henney, ‘The Wheel of Time’ Is a Full-Circle Moment
Daniel Henney is a big believer in vision boards. His has looked different over the years — houses he’d like to own one day, destinations he wants to travel to, goals he wants to accomplish. He couches this admission by referring to it as both “cheesy” and “hokey” over the course of our long Zoom conversation, but when it comes to both his life and his career, Henney doesn’t want to leave room for fear and doubt to creep in.
Over 15 years ago, he stumbled across the original cover of the first book in the late Robert Jordan‘s The Wheel of Time series, The Eye of the World. Readers will know it: Darrell K. Sweet‘s illustration features three prominent characters — one looks like a knight, one a smaller woman wielding a staff, and the third a younger man trailing behind them, a large moon illuminating the sky behind them as they ride. Henney, who had grown up watching classic fantasy films like The Neverending Story and The Princess Bride, felt immediately drawn to it, in part because he’d always harbored the desire to play a role in a big fantasy project — so he saved it on his phone, making it a part of his vision board at the time, in the spring of 2011. Eight years later, he landed the role of Lan Mandragoran (“that guy on that horse,” Henney points out) in Amazon’s epic television adaptation of Jordan’s novels, and only then rediscovered the very book cover he’d saved, still on his phone.
Daniel Henney Reflects on His Beginnings in Small-Town Michigan
Fans of Jordan’s novels are certainly familiar with the main motif that runs through the 14-book series (15, if you count the prequel): there are no beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time, with all stories making up part of a larger pattern, ages that repeat and cycle as the Wheel itself continues to turn. If you wanted to pinpoint a beginning for Henney, though, it would be November 28, 1979, when he was born to mom Christine and dad Philip in Carson City, Michigan, which he describes as a “very Rockwell-esque” Midwest town, with “20 miles of cornfields” stretching in between major hubs and only about 900 people making up the total population. (Today, that same population has only grown by 200 or so.)
Henney doesn’t mind reflecting on his formative years when I ask about them, but it’s clear that, as the only Asian kid in a small Michigan town, he had to find his niche quickly in order to avoid being bullied. “I figured out that the best way to be popular in any way was to be good at sports, or actually just to save myself from getting the shit kicked out of me sometimes,” Henney says. “I realized if I could play basketball, that would help me build some cachet.” As it turns out, basketball didn’t just offer him a means of social clout; he was actually pretty good at it, and went on to become a star player for his high school team, as well as two different colleges. Was there ever a version of Daniel Henney that could have forged a completely different career path? “I was never good enough to play pro,” he tells me, “but I think if I had put all my chips in the basketball world, I could maybe have played overseas somewhere. I thought about it, possibly in Korea, but luckily, at that time, acting had come into my life, and I kind of parlayed into that. But basketball was my religion growing up.”
Before stepping on a stage or inside an audition room, however, Henney needed his big break — and it came in the form of an unexpected opportunity. Once he got to college, companies like Abercrombie & Fitch had forged a reputation for their store-covering mall ads featuring gorgeous models, both men and women. Henney’s girlfriend at the time casually suggested that he audition to be in said ads, but Henney was initially reluctant to even consider the idea: “If I do that, my dad will kill me. I’m not going to pose in my underwear.” Still, the spark had been lit, and Henney says he was 19 or 20 when he heard an ad on the radio while driving around with his mom. “It was one of those, ‘Do you think you have what it takes? Walk the catwalk in front of all the agents from Elite, Next, all the top agencies in the world.'” He went to the convention, headshots in hand, and from there was sent to Chicago, where he started modeling — not in his underwear for Abercrombie & Fitch, but wholesome, Christmas-with-the-family ads for JCPenney and Kohl’s. It was there that he met a scout from Hong Kong, who was looking for mixed-race models to star in TV commercials overseas. Henney quickly acquired his first passport. He was only supposed to be in Hong Kong for three months; he ended up staying for three years.
Appearing in commercials all over — in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore — proved to be invaluable in-camera experience for Henney, although once his time there was done, he moved back to the States, where he threw himself into the theater. As a teen, he’d never felt brave enough to join his high school’s theater program: “I would watch what they did, and I wanted to be a part of it.” Yet being in New York, where he started appearing in Off-Broadway productions, taught Henney an important lesson that he’s carried with him in the years since, all the way through to The Wheel of Time: “Acting is so much about being confident, and it’s so much about the willingness to make a fool of yourself, and to make choices that you don’t know if they’re right or not, but you have to make those choices and go with it.” Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Henney’s building confidence started to pay off; in 2005, his previous connections in Asia came calling, leading to him successfully booking his first television role.
‘My Lovely Sam Soon’ Was a Crash Course in Korean for Daniel Henney
Henney refers to his time on the Korean drama My Lovely Sam Soon as a myriad of things: “the most formative, the most challenging, probably the most frightening and the most exciting time of my entire life.” It wasn’t just a game-changer for his career; it was a rocket ship, in which, over the course of three or four years in Korea, he went from being an absolute unknown to starring in movies. The only problem was that, when he was initially cast in My Lovely Sam Soon, Henney couldn’t speak a word of Korean. His mother had been adopted after the Korean War by a white farm family in Michigan, Henney says, before launching into a pitch-perfect imitation of the Midwestern accent she still speaks in. While his struggle with the language was written into his character in My Lovely Sam Soon, Dr. Henry Kim, Henney still poured himself into the process of teaching himself Korean, night after night, with the knowledge that the country was essentially watching him learn on camera. After three or four years, he knew things were starting to click when he started dreaming in Korean. “Now, I consider myself fluent,” Henney says. “I mean, I couldn’t give a political debate, but I couldn’t do that in English, either.”
My Lovely Sam Soon was, arguably, the role that put Henney on the map for Korean audiences, in part because of how popular the show itself became over the course of a mere 16 episodes. It may have helped, too, that Henney’s character was essentially part of a love triangle within a series that blended drama with rom-com, the latter of which still has a special place in Henney’s heart. He’s well aware that the genre tends to be written off, but it was a lifeline for him while he was working far from home. “Rom-coms actually saved me in many ways when I was living overseas and in desperate need of some American culture to reconnect to. I must have watched Notting Hill hundreds of times.” He’s also rooting for the rom-com resurgence we’re in now, particularly in Asia: “I just love that genre, and I hope it keeps going.”
Daniel Henney on Making the Leap to American Procedurals With ‘Criminal Minds’
After My Lovely Sam Soon, more Korean television roles followed — Philip in Spring Waltz, Kai in The Fugitive: Plan B — but by then, Henney was also landing guest parts here, in shows like CBS’s Hawaii Five-0 reboot and NBC’s Revolution. Henney didn’t know it at the time, but it was all building up to the project that would result in his first starring role on American network television. Even by procedural standards, the Criminal Minds franchise is considered pretty dark, but Henney says he had a great experience playing a profiler on its Beyond Borders spin-off. Although joining a show like this hadn’t even been on his radar at the time, he cites Erica Messer, Criminal Minds co-creator and a close personal friend, as the one who successfully pitched him on the role of Special Agent Matt Simmons. “I loved the idea of being on something from the get-go, having that sense of ownership and creation,” he adds. “Just the absolute best family, the nicest people, the coolest people, a well-oiled machine. You’re not working too much. It’s very efficient.” While Beyond Borders only lasted for two seasons before its cancelation, Henney’s character was brought over to the flagship series, although he notes his experience working on those final three seasons wasn’t really the same: “As much as I love everyone on it, I was like the new kid in school.”
When the original incarnation of Criminal Minds ended, Henney was on the lookout for something different, but his agent at the time, Andrea Weintraub, had already heard about a little fantasy show in the works at Prime Video called The Wheel of Time. Given Henney’s abiding affection for the genre, he jumped at the chance to audition, even more so once he learned that Rosamund Pike was already attached in a leading capacity as Moiraine Damodred. As for the showrunner? It turns out Henney had already been in a room with Rafe Judkins once upon a time. “I was second or third in line for a big role in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Henney reveals. “He was in the room while I was doing all my final tests, and he remembered me from that.” Henney read for the part of Moiraine’s Warder, al’Lan Mandragoran, all the way from Korea, and eventually, after a series of callbacks, ended up FaceTiming with Pike, “just to see if we could coexist together.” All those meetings weren’t simply about whether he could pull off the role in an acting capacity, though. “Are you a decent human? They’re auditioning you for that, as well,” Henney says. “They’re auditioning you for yourself, and if they can stand being around you for the next decade.” A couple of weeks after that FaceTime with Pike, whom he affectionately refers to as “Ros” throughout our conversation, the role of Lan was his.
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Daniel Henney Reflects on His Final “Unreal” ‘Wheel of Time’ Season 2 Scene
He also discusses the challenges of filming Lan and Moiraine’s breakup scene and what he can hint at for Season 3.
‘The Wheel of Time’ Hit Some Bumps in Its Early Seasons
Joining the world of The Wheel of Time was immersive for Henney from the get-go, in part because the cast all had to relocate to Prague in anticipation of filming the first season. Henney tells me it was like being at summer camp, but the experience also allowed him to develop his chemistry with Pike in the lead-up to production. In The Wheel of Time, Moiraine, a powerful channeler known as an Aes Sedai, is magically bonded to her Warder, Lan, which allows them to not only have an awareness of each other in battle but also experience one another’s deepest emotions. It’s an intimate relationship that goes beyond romance, and there’s a good chance that it wouldn’t have translated to the screen without any work done behind the scenes. Henney spent a good portion of his time at the house Pike rented during production in Prague, where he says they hung out and “talked for hundreds of hours.” Like him, Pike wanted to be proactive about building their characters’ connection, and Henney believes their commitment fully paid off. “A lot of things that happen on-screen 1744898681, we don’t even plan, just because we’re so used to the characters — the same step at the same time, or getting off the horse at the same moment.”
Less synchronous was the filming process for The Wheel of Time‘s first season, which was first hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, halting production on multiple occasions. “We were shut down three or four times,” Henney says. “We were rushed to the airports. You’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of people having to be coordinated on flights like that — apartments being shut down, suitcases being put in different rooms, storage units, storage lockers, not knowing when we were coming back, and then getting called back, only to be shut down again, and then come back again.” Even once filming finally resumed, new COVID protocols, including face masks and red zones, had been put in place, impacting filming locations and resulting in scenes that either had to be drastically changed or scrapped altogether. “Not to mention we had a huge internal issue with one of our actors,” Henney adds, in reference to Season 1’s Mat Cauthon, Barney Harris, who exited the series in September 2020 for undisclosed reasons, leading to a significant rewrite of the character’s storyline in the final episodes. As far as Henney is concerned, however, no one has had a bigger weight on their shoulders throughout the entire process than The Wheel of Time‘s showrunner, Judkins. “What that man went through in Season 1 and Season 2… I’ve never seen anyone go through that with this much pressure and do it with such grace and just neverending positivity.”
In light of those difficult circumstances, Henney admits that it took him some time to feel comfortable in his role. “All the shit we went through during Season 1, it was hard to even feel comfortable as a human.” Scenes where he had to deliver a lot of expositional dialogue about the cursed city of Shadar Logoth, for instance, all while carrying Pike in his arms, were difficult to pull off; he also cites Episode 5, “Blood Calls Blood,” in which Lan leads an anguished mourning ceremony for one of his fallen Warder brethren, as “beautifully written, but tough to execute.” Part of his struggle also revolved around the fact that Lan is a man of few words, which was something Henney had never played before. “He’s really taught me to be more comfortable with stillness,” Henney says. “I do feel like, as humans, sometimes we feel the need to have to fill spaces in conversation. Lan doesn’t feel that need. He’s perfectly fine being in the background.” Henney hopes the results speak for themselves on the show, but they’re beyond evident even in speaking with him through a computer screen; he’s clearly learned to be comfortable in the silence, taking pauses before giving thoughtful answers to each of my questions.
Daniel Henney Has Hope for the Future of ‘The Wheel of Time’
Ironically, Season 2, which involved a much more emotionally fraught storyline for Lan, was actually where Henney says he began to fall into step with his character. That understanding extended to his movement and physicality — feeling the weight of a katana strapped across his shoulders gave Henney a firm sense of how the Warder walks through the world of The Wheel of Time. He also gradually worked his way up to becoming more and more hands-on in a stunt capacity until he was trusted enough to do an entire scene himself, without a double. “I was very proud of the fight with Aviendha in the fourth episode [of Season 3],” he tells me. “That was all me.” The scene itself was fun to shoot, but the energy between the Warder and the Aiel Maiden of the Spear, played by Ayoola Smart, is what makes it feel like more than a simple sparring. Henney likens it to two big cats fighting each other. “It’s kind of frightening, but they’re so good, and they have so much control over their weaponry that they can play at that level, and it’s not even close to being dangerous.”
While the first season had its own obstacles to overcome, and the second was impacted by the writers’ strike in 2023, Season 3, which wraps up with its finale this week, finally represents The Wheel of Time hitting its stride — or, as Henney says, getting to “really flex its muscles and show what it can do,” citing the series’ wider, more cinematic aspect ratio and the addition of more grittiness. “This is what we all wanted from the beginning.” He’s quick to praise his fellow castmates for coming into their own as well, chief among them Dónal Finn, who took over the role of Mat in Season 2. “All of the actors have really fallen nicely into their characters now — especially Dónal, who had that challenge. It’s really incredible to see. He’s been a godsend. He’s so, so incredibly talented and such a great guy.”
Henney’s also feeling very optimistic about the future story possibilities for Lan; even though a renewal hasn’t yet been ordered, “we think we’ve got a really good shot.” He does admit that he wants to lead a TV show one day, since he can’t really picture carving out a definitive niche for himself in films, but it’s also difficult for him to envision a particular ending for The Wheel of Time yet, and why would he want to? As it happens, after speaking with Judkins about what could come next, Henney’s already working on his next vision board — for Season 4. “I’m seeing Lan doing really cool things, and I also want to get to that point where we see Malkier.”
All episodes of The Wheel of Time are available to stream on Prime Video.
