There is versatility in acting and then there is Paul Dano. No sooner had he been seen last year as the masked, panting, clingfilm-wrapped Riddler, who dispatches his victims with hammers and bombs in The Batman, than he turned up as the placid, moon-faced parent based on Steven Spielberg’s own father in The Fabelmans.
Dano has more than two decades of full-blooded, often deranged performances behind him, such as the wheedling preacher in There Will Be Blood and a suspected child abductor in Prisoners. He has also been fragile and huggable as the silent, surly teen in Little Miss Sunshine, the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy, and Pierre in the BBC’s War and Peace where, as historian Simon Schama put it, his “every blink is a sonata of bewilderment”.
Even so, 2022’s double whammy of The Batman and The Fabelmans seemed to extend his range all at once. Near the end of The Batman, Dano is finally seen without his mask; sitting in a diner with a question mark daubed in the foam of his cappuccino, he is shown a clutch of different IDs by the arresting officer, each one with his face on it. “Which one’s you?” the cop asks. “You tell me,” the Riddler blinks back.
The same could be asked of the man who plays him. On a video call from the home he shares in Brooklyn, New York, with the actor and writer Zoe Kazan and their two young children, the 39-year-old Dano nibbles on crackers and hummus. All seems well in his world. We are still a month away from the actors’ strike, and he recently returned from serving on the main competition jury at the Cannes film festival. “I would do it again in a heartbeat,” he sighs. He has also just watched a cut of his latest film, Dumb Money, and is feeling chipper. “I usually experience crushing disappointment. But this is fun. It has a pressure-cooker feel to it.”
As well it might. Dumb Money, adapted from Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction book The Antisocial Network, dramatises the 2021 GameStop saga, in which investors betting against the beleaguered video game retailer got a nasty shock when the downward trajectory was reversed by online defenders coming to the company’s rescue and snapping up its stock. Foremost among them was Keith Gill, known online as Roaring Kitty, whose YouTube videos alerted his followers to the injustice of Wall Street pummelling GameStop. His own stock soared to tens of millions of dollars in the process.
In preparing to play Gill, Dano had countless hours of online video to refer to. “I became totally smitten with him,” he smiles. “He’s such a buoyant spirit. I could see there was something so beautiful in him. It’s all about: here I am, I’m wearing a headband and a cat shirt because I think it’s cool.” Gill’s backwards baseball cap was also vital to Dano. “It makes you feel younger,” he says. “As an actor, you’re always looking for anything to grab on to. What’s behind that door? What’s under that rock? Anything that’ll help.” He drew the line at trying to contact Gill. “He was subpoenaed by Congress and has really been off the grid since then. It didn’t feel right to drive to Massachusetts and stand outside whichever house I thought was his.”
For Dano, Gill was the right folk hero at the right time. “It was the pandemic. Everyone was kicking GameStop when it was down. Saving it felt like having something to believe in, fighting to keep something alive.” It also came at a point when the chasm between the 1% and everyone else felt starker than ever. Most of the main characters in the film are introduced with a caption announcing their net worth. What sort of relationship does Dano have to money? “I have two kids and a mortgage, so there’s a practical element to it,” he says. “I want to be able to do the work I want to do and make enough to live a decent life, which I know is a very privileged thing to be able to say. But I don’t want my self-worth to be my net worth.”
He grew up in Manhattan, the son of a financial adviser. When did he realise there were people poorer than him in the world? “First of all, we were in a one-bedroom apartment with two bunk beds and a bed all in one room,” he says, keen to set the record straight. “There was a church next to our building, and they’d let homeless people sleep there. I had a really hard time with that as a kid. It made me upset every day. I remember crying. It was pretty intense.”
How does he measure his worth now if it isn’t financial? “It’s hard for actors because you’re constantly looking for approval from others. It doesn’t set up a great psychology of self-worth. But there’s no greater value than what I mean to my wife and my kids. If that stock drops, that would be the hardest one. Then you’re in real trouble.”
He and Kazan met in 2007 when they were both in the off-Broadway play Things We Want, directed by Ethan Hawke. They have worked together only occasionally since then. They were co-stars in Kelly Reichardt’s austere 2011 western Meek’s Cutoff, while in the complex 2012 black comedy Ruby Sparks, which Kazan wrote, she is the muse summoned into existence by Dano, who plays a blocked novelist. The actor has zero social media presence, but fans have been amused by Kazan’s occasional tweets about him. “I don’t like to talk about our kids publicly,” she tweeted in June, “but I do wish film Twitter could hear Paul recapping the movies he saw in Cannes for our inquisitive four-year-old child.”
Starting a family has altered the roles he accepts. “Now I’m a parent, I’ll pick those spots where I embrace certain shadows. I feel very different about it now than I did when I was in my 20s.” If he visits the dark side less frequently these days, that doesn’t mean he is any less committed.
Matt Reeves, who directed The Batman and wrote the role of the Riddler with Dano in mind, describes him as indefatigable. “Paul loves doing a lot of takes, as do I,” he tells me. “We took two days on the final scene between him and Robert Pattinson as Batman, and we must have easily done 70 or 80 takes. Paul loves exploring. He’s obsessive that way.” Not to mention unpredictable, as Reeves explains: “There were all these moments as the Riddler where he’d be tickled by something and then fly into a rage, and you never knew from take to take where that switch would come. I’d be sitting there with the headphones on, trying to stifle my laughter because he’d always do something surprising. Paul would ask me: ‘Was that crazy? Was that too much?’ I’d say: ‘No it’s fantastic. Let’s do another.’”
Dano’s brushes with blockbusters in the past have been infrequent and ill-fated: he had the misfortune to star in both the Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz catastrophe Knight and Day and the science-fiction western Cowboys & Aliens within the space of a year. He admits to having turned down other big-budget projects in favour of smaller indie films, eager to have a career rather than a “moment”. And he was a hypnotic, intuitive presence from the get-go: his second film, the 2001 drama L.I.E., in which he was a neglected teenager who is groomed by a paedophile, played by Brian Cox, remains among the most bracing work on either actor’s CV. The scene in which Cox tenderly shaves the young Dano’s cherubic face with a cutthroat razor is still daring in its refusal to untangle menace from lyricism. “My first thought now is: how did we do that?” Dano gasps when I bring it up. “When you’re young, you’re like, sure, whatever. Now it would weigh on me more, frankly. It was a good experience, though. I love Brian, and he was lovely to me.”
The mystery is how Dano knew in his teens and early 20s that he didn’t want to throw in his lot with the multiplexes. “I don’t think it was all wisdom,” he reflects. “Some of it was that I was scared or didn’t feel comfortable. It’s always been hard for me to lie. I’ve got to believe in what I’m doing. And then I’m gonna have to talk about it afterwards. That’s pretty painful if you don’t like it. Then you’d feel like a politician or a salesman.” Occasionally, he took time out to recalibrate, going back to college after he had made Little Miss Sunshine and again after There Will Be Blood. To him, though, there is no mystery. “It’s who I am,” he says. “I was always a slow and steady guy. I was never a hare.”
Everyone who works with him testifies to his diligence and integrity. So Yong Kim, who directed Dano as a rock musician estranged from his young daughter in For Ellen, credits him with creating that character. “It came alive because of Paul,” she says. “He developed so many details. The outfits, the rings, fingernails, hair, the way he walked and carried himself. He transformed completely. We’d also ask him to come to lunch meetings with financiers so he could help us raise funding. He’d be very casual in his beanie hat and T-shirt, but so grounded and gracious.”
Kate McKinnon may have described Dano in 2016 as a “hunky sad-eyed sex machine” but Kim is one of the few directors to use him on screen in a plainly sexual way, as opposed to the damaged sexuality of his characters in Ruby Sparks and the prison-break drama Escape at Dannemora. “I don’t know why more people don’t cast him in that kind of role,” says Kim. “I wish he would take on some dynamic love stories, because that’s within him as well.”
For now, he is busy establishing his directing career, preparing a follow-up to the impressive Wildlife, his tense and visually assured 2018 drama starred Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal. He is also getting used to the novelty of being the father figure on set. “I’m glad I’ve graduated to a new class of character. The work has to meet your life in some way. It’s offering you something you need somehow. It’s really a trip to have been the 18-year-old on movie sets and to now have 18-year-olds asking you questions, and you’re the adult.” He resists answering, though, when I ask why he still needs to act. “I don’t love trying to articulate that because figuring it out is what keeps me going,” he says. Call it the question mark in his cappuccino.
• Dumb Money is in cinemas from 22 September. This interview took place before the current Sag-aftra strike
