Mac On Track

by Jessica Owers

Stage and screen star Daniel MacPherson has been a hit since joining the Channel 7 racing team, but when Jessica Owers sat down with him, she discovered a genuine industry die-hard.

Daniel MacPherson has the face of someone cut for stardom; beardy, blueeyed, teeth as a dentist’s daydream. Since 1998 he has been a star of Australian film, stage and television, from Neighbours to Land Of Bad alongside Russell Crowe and Liam Hemsworth. But give this man a racehorse because MacPherson is the newest face of 7Racing, the one they’ve nicknamed ‘DMac’, and he’s never been more at home. “I don’t want to say I was dropping hints to get the gig,” he says, but would you blame him when his colleagues include Bruce McAvaney, Jason Richardson and Lizzie Jelfs?

MacPherson, however, isn’t a once-a-year racing stooge. As everyone at the network found out, racehorses were a 25-year pattern for this popular actor. “A lot of people say they know racing, that they’ve been involved in racing, but I’d been in and around it the majority of my career,” he says.

“These days I relax by studying pedigrees and hypotheticals online at night before I go to bed.”

The unlikely obsession began when MacPherson moved to Melbourne for Neighbours. He was little more than 17 years old but, as part of Channel 10’s coverage of the Melbourne Cup carnival, he found himself drawn to the tie-up stalls and mounting yard instead of the colour and cameras of The Birdcage. As a triathlete himself, and a good one, MacPherson was fascinated by the animals, and in no time he was going to trackwork at Flemington, which led to friendships with Lee Freedman and Lindsay Park and, inevitably, racehorse ownership.

“I ended up buying a horse with Lee at Magic Millions, a Sebring filly in about 2011,” he says.

“We missed out on the Sebring filly we wanted, and of course that one ended up earning over $1 million and our one had seven starts for one place and we couldn’t sell her. We gave her a lovely retirement at Kitchwin Hills, and after a few years of writing cheques for service fees and agistment and whatnot, I suddenly thought maybe I should learn a bit more about this.”

MacPherson chose his mentors well…the likes of John and Paul Messara, and Mick Malone. Today he owns three broodmares, has three foals on the ground and three horses in work. One of them is the very smart Saltaire, whom MacPherson named after a building in hometown Cronulla. “I’m determined to keep the ownership number in single digits,” he says, but doesn’t everyone say that?

MacPherson breezed into 7Racing at the same time as the spring carnival last year. He was everywhere, from post-race hookups to the stalls, crooning Mr Brightside on live television. His job was to shoot the breeze, read the tic tac and follow the energy, and he did it like he’d been doing it all his life. “For a racing fan to get that kind of access, it’s just amazing,” he says. “I got to stand at the winning post on a Cox Plate day when Romantic Warrior just noses out Mr Brightside, and Danny Shum is there next to me and JMac is running back. I get to step into a high-calibre, highly credentialled, highly skilled, incredibly well-produced sports production, and none of that is by accident. They have exceptional people at every level in that team, from the onair talent to the research and producers. There is a reason why Channel 7 is doing so many weekends, expanding its coverage.”

Last January, MacPherson followed the 7 team to Magic Millions. For a man with more than 200 hours of live television experience (he presented Dancing With The Stars for seven seasons), the sale ring was different theatre. “It’s another live performance, isn’t it?” he says, a bit like his 7Racing promo. “This place is complete madness and I love it, from the rapid-fire auctioneer to the frantic bid-spotters, to the chinos and pastels…it’s awesome.”

But up and down the barns and around the Gold Coast sale ring, few cast a second glance at MacPherson. He’s the Channel 7 guy, not the movie star, and he isn’t for sale. He’s not a Snitzel filly or a colt by I Am Invincible, which are the real stars here. MacPherson likes that apathy of the yearling crowd because, in show business with its speciality in make-believe, the thoroughbreds and their people are real. “This sport thrives on characters, and I don’t think characters are more on show than at somewhere like Magic Millions,” he says.

MacPherson’s first exposure to racing was in 1983 when Kiwi finished like Bernborough to win the Melbourne Cup. His grandmother Grace had trotted him down to the TAB in Southgate, Sylvania, not far from Cronulla, to place their bets on the big race. MacPherson, just three years old, won $5. “I’ve played golf with Jim Cassidy and his story about that ride on Kiwi, and how significant it was in his life, is amazing because it was similarly significant in my life,” he says as he recalls Grace’s kitchen filled with the chatterbox rhythms of 2KY racing radio.

Today, the actor visits his horses in Scone and talks shop with whoever will listen. He’s in a punters group with Hedley Thomas, the chief crime podcaster of Australia, and he says he’s about due for another “good, dirty, beardy horse role”. While he’s played a bushranger and an elfin prince in previous roles for film and television, his most famous horsey role was playing the late Jason Oliver in the 2011 production The Cup. Though nearly 15 years ago, he doesn’t forget the responsibility of the casting. “It was an exceptional tragedy and a tragic accident, and a triumph of an Australian story,” MacPherson says. “I really had to look under the bonnet as research for that role.” ➤

“This sport thrives on characters, and I don’t think characters are more on show than at somewhere like Magic Millions.”

MacPherson was just 17 when plucked out of a triathlon crowd by a talent scout, and in 1999 he won a Logie Award for Most Popular New Talent courtesy of Neighbours. He spent three years in the UK, earning a role in long-running drama The Bill before returning to Australia to present The X Factor and, eventually, Dancing With The Stars. At 30, he relocated to Los Angeles, stepping away from Dancing With The Stars and City Homicide, and the timing of that decision weighed on him heavily. “They were the number-one live entertainment show and number-one drama in the country, and I just quit it all to go to America. It took me three years to get my first American lead role, inching and scratching my way, job by job, in the most competitive environment in the world.”

Actors follow the work. When it started to happen for MacPherson in the US, it was relentless. He travelled the world, but five years ago the goalposts shifted with the arrival of his son, Austin, and MacPherson’s focus since has been family, fatherhood and working locally. “I’m getting to the point in my career now where I’m more selective about what I’m doing because everything gets measured against time with my son,” he says. Anyway, fame isn’t the same at 44 as it was when he was 18, mobbed by teenagers outside a shopping centre, his face on the cover of Dolly magazine. “I think that’s where a lot of young performers get stuck,” he says. “They get being famous and being an actor confused, and for me, my hope is that any fame or notoriety comes from being really good at my job.”

MacPherson is good at his job. He learns his lines quickly thanks to something like a photographic memory. In primary school, he was identified by the Mensa organisation, the world’s oldest, largest and most famous high-IQ society. “But we never really did anything with it,” he says. “It’s been more a conversation piece than anything.” In the entertainment business, it’s a valuable man that can act and host on both live and recorded gigs. Throw in film and you’ll understand why MacPherson is never short of work. He recently wrapped a national tour with actor John Waters in the stage production The Woman In Black, and in 2023 he completed a second series of the Apple sci-fi drama Foundation. “They just don’t come any bigger,” he says. “To work on that scale of television is extraordinary.”

But ticking away in the background is the sport of kings. Once a year, usually at the end of the year, celebrities spill onto racecourses with their love of racing sudden and annual. In the case of Dan MacPherson, the passion is as genuine and rich as morning rain. MacPherson can chew the fat with Robbie Williams one day, James Bester the next, then trot the globe with Russell Crowe on big-budget casting. “But you know,” he says, “to have people like David Hayes walk up to you and say ‘great job, loving your coverage on 7, love what you’re bringing to it’, that’s the stuff of legends right there.”