Cursed Star Daniel Sharman Reveals What It Was Really Like Playing The Weeping Monk - Exclusive

Arthur is a skilled fighter, Merlin wields magic, and Nimue has Excalibur, but there's little doubt who the most fearsome character on Netflix's new fantasy show Cursed is: the Weeping Monk. As played by actor Daniel Sharman, the Weeping Monk is a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield, a fearsome hunter of everything Fey, and the source of some of Cursed's biggest secrets. In other words? You don't want to mess with him.

However, while the Weeping Monk is both tragic and scary, Sharman isn't — as we've seen from his previous appearances in projects like Fear the Walking Dead, The Originals, Immortals, and Teen Wolf. So, how did the actor get ready to play Cursed's most formidable foe? A ton of practice.

"Lots of fight training," Sharman answers when Looper asked him in an exclusive interview how he prepped for his turn as the Weeping Monk. He continues, "I'd just done a project where I'd been on a horse, so it wasn't entirely new to me, although this was a whole different level of training. I obviously had to get in pretty amazing shape because the rigors of it were so particular."

According to Sharman, that meant he had to push his body "to the limit," but also had to take some time to learn the Weeping Monk's particular fighting style. The character expresses himself through carnage, after all, "so getting influences from different kinds of fights and different kinds of disciplines to put you in a space where you can find how he moves" was key, Sharman explains.

Then, of course, there was the Weeping Monk's unique look. Cursed's co-creator, comic book legend Frank Miller, designed the costume, and the final version stuck pretty closely to his initial concepts. The Monk's makeup was a different story. "We tried a few looks, a birthmark," Sharman tells Looper. "At one point, it was going to be like a full AC/DC thing. So, we worked on it, and then we went through a number of different iterations until we found something that worked that wasn't too crazy."

With all those tools at his disposal, Sharman then had to go and make the Monk his own. That part, he says, was similar to how he'd approach any role: "I worked with different people and just tried to get a sense of putting something together slowly. You're always trying different things."

Surprisingly, while the Weeping Monk has a big role on Cursed, Sharman says that he didn't necessarily get to work all that much with some of the cast's biggest names.

"We were largely kept apart because they were such different stories going on together," he notes. "So, we didn't see a lot of each other working, which is rare for me because usually you get to know everyone really well and you have a relationship with everybody."

Sharman points to Gustaf Skarsgård, who plays Merlin on Cursed, as an example: "I only ever saw Gustaf in the gym. We swam, did odd bits of music here and there, but largely, we were always missing each other at work."

For Sharman, almost the whole shoot was like that. He says, "I was largely isolated. I would come in and do my job and then leave." Thankfully, Cursed shot in the United Kingdom, where Sharman is from, so he could visit friends and family during his off days. Still, he says he was thankful for Cursed's virtual press tour, which let him finally connect with the rest of the cast: "It's lovely to see them on this because we actually get to all be like, 'Hey, how are you?'"

As the Weeping Monk, Sharman has plenty of stand-out moments on Cursed, but his favorite memory from the shoot didn't happen on set. It went down at a local hospital.

"That costume was amazing just to look at, but very hard to fight in. Once, I twisted my ankle before going on to set," he shares with Looper. As a result, Sharman had to take a quick trip to the nearby hospital ... but there wasn't time for the actor to change out of his Weeping Monk costume, so he showed up ready for medical treatment "in full Grim Reaper" mode.

As scary as the Weeping Monk looks on screen, apparently he's even scarier in real life. "[I'm] sitting in the waiting room of this emergency room with all these people coming in and thinking, 'Oh God, death has really come,'" Sharman remembers. "So, they asked me to go and wait in a different room because I was scaring some of the other patients. [...] We sat there scaring the people of middle England with me basically looking at them, thinking, 'You're next.'"

Eventually, of course, Sharman got the treatment he needed and returned to set to finish his work on the show, which he sounds incredibly proud of. "There's a bit of a journey to go on," he says, "and if you stick with it to the end, I think you come away thinking, 'Wow, that's, that's an entire world that was just made.'"

Cursed's first season is available on Netflix now.