Daniel Gillies speaks out on crisis in South Sudan

Daniel Gillies, the Canadian-born, New Zealand-raised actor/director, has been all over the small screen in the last seven years and it’s a trend that’s set to continue.

Since 2010, he has played Elijah Mikaelson on both The Vampire Diaries and its spinoff series, The Originals (he also recently directed an episode). He was Dr. Joel Goran^[1] on the Toronto-filmed Saving Hope from 2012 to 2015. (That show was cast so well “it’ll be challenging to have that sort of chemistry again,” he said.)

He directed and starred in his own independent movie, Broken Kingdom, in 2012.

And he recently returned to Vancouver, a Vampire Diaries filming location, where he made the Lifetime movie The Lost Wife of Robert Durst — directed by Canadian Emmy winner Yves Simoneau — in which he plays the challenging role of murder suspect Durst.

He’ll go back to shooting Season 5 of The Originals in Atlanta soon and, in the fall, Gillies will be seen on CBS’s new action series SEAL Team, also debuting on Global TV.

But the Winnipeg-born actor’s latest project has nothing to do with make-believe.

Gillies was travelling to Uganda this month to leverage his celebrity to make people aware of what the Washington Post calls the “the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.”

With a film crew, Gillies was visiting refugee settlements in Uganda largely populated with South Sudanese. Almost two million people inside South Sudan have been displaced by a civil war that’s been going on since 2013. The country also faces one of its worst famines, according to the UN.

Gillies was travelling with Oxfam to shine a light on the massive humanitarian catastrophe by reaching out to his millions of fans on social media.

He has been posting videos and other content on his Twitter^[2] and Instagram^[3] feeds highlighting the crisis.

“I recently did a Facebook Live event for The Originals with Joseph Morgan (Klaus Mikaelson) and we generated millions of views simply by turning on a cellphone. So I’m going to use these great social media tools to shout out about this crisis. And, because I’m on a show with an ardent fan base, I felt like, ‘Why don’t I use that to springboard this information into the world?’”

Gillies, 41, has acquired a worldwide following of passionate fans who turned up in droves this summer when he appeared at “Mystic Falls” fan events in both Paris and Melbourne.

Gillies is married and has two children with actress Rachael Leigh Cook (Perception, Robot Chicken), which provides another motivation for his activism.

“I have two young children and I want them to know that their father gave a s--t, because this will be their world and we should be fighting for it. And I feel with great conviction, that if we allow this situation to continue with the same state of ignorance, my children will be asking, ‘Daddy, what did you do when this terrible thing took place?’

“So, I’m going to scream this loudly from the rooftops, hopefully with as many supporters as I can drag along with me. But we can’t ignore this issue any longer. This crisis is upon us. It’s up to us to make a sound and shine a light.”

Gillies comes from a professional family that includes a pediatrician father, a nurse mother and a great-great-great-grandfather who was a renowned plastic surgery pioneer. So his activism may be his own take on the Hippocratic Oath.

“There’s a type of manic distraction in popular culture, whether it’s a Kardashian wardrobe mishap, a Trump mis-tweet or yet another tragic mass shooting. The world seems so filled with violations right now; it’s almost impossible to focus on any one thing. But we’re facing one of the greatest humanitarian crises the world has ever seen in Africa and I say that without hyperbole.

“There are millions of disenfranchised civilians who’ve had to flee their homes and farms: in South Sudan, Yemen, Somalia and Nigeria. It’s as if, almost by our ignorance or distraction, we’re a silent partner in this tragedy. I had to do something.”