2024-04-13 03:01:00
“It gives me a little shame talk about it in these circumstances,” says Paul Dano, and makes a face. “Will it make anyone listen to me?” The actor may hate me for mentioning it, but first He was part of a band. Found today in the deepest recesses of Spotify, Mook put out two records. They were things psychedelic, strange and murky, made when Dano was in his early twenties and a reluctant movie star. Little Miss Sunshine It had been a great success. Bloody oil It had been an even bigger one. But the public’s attention was hard, terrifying. The way he dealt with it was back to school and make smoke bands with their best friends.
“I wanted to distance myself a little bit from… whatever it was,” he says. Nowadays he feels more comfortable with “it”, but continue to avoid words like “fame” or “celebrity.” “I was still quite young, and from a personality point of view it was strange to start being recognized. It wasn’t something I was looking for. I wanted to work more and be in certain types of films, but also put boundaries with some of the other things that come with it. I think it was necessary.” And so we have Mook: a breadcrumb to follow in the mystery of decipher Dano.
Sitting in his New York home and wearing joggers and a pink hat, this man from 39 years He has a peaceful countenance and a deep, slightly monotonous voice. It has a strange effect. He is both kind and distant, familiar and at the same time a complete stranger. Dano is not secretive per se, but it is singularly inscrutable, with a propensity for long pauses and half-thoughts. I’m no closer to figuring it out at the beginning of our conversation than I am at the end.
On screen, Dano is one of the most skilled stars in cinema, perhaps because of his childish face. It is cherubic. Sweet. But a completely scary face in certain lighting. In The suspicion, 12 years of slavery y Batman: In the latter he played the Riddler facing the Dark Knight of Robert Pattinson. For the uneven romantic comedy Ruby: the girl of my dreamsthe Beach Boys biopic Love & Mercy and the semi-autobiographical production of Steven Spielberg The Fabelmans, in which he played the manager of the director’s father, leaned in the other direction. These were the films that took advantage of their small wounds, that feeling of a fragile soul on the verge of total implosion.
But does Dano have a story, a big arc that explains How did you get from A to Z? The story seems to be… it doesn’t actually have any. Or at least one that is known. I wonder if your work is the path, if there are links between your choices. WildlifeFor example, your directorial debut in 2018 starring Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal, revolved around the dissolution of a marriage from the perspective of a child. He co-wrote it with the actress Zoe Kazan, his partner since they worked together on a play titled Things We Want in 2007 (today they have two children). The Fabelmans It was about a marriage that, despite its well-kept appearance, was fraying at the seams. The astronautDano’s new film for Netflix about an astronaut chatting with a huge CGI spider which may or may not be a figment of his imagination, is also, unexpectedly, about a doomed marriage. So you’re interested in stories about marriage, right?
“It never occurred to me to relate Spaceman con Wildlife y The Fabelmanssays Dano. Damn. “My attraction to those movies had to do with trying to understand my own parents in some way. And in a way elaborate my own experience.” But The astronaut? “I was questioning her more from the spider’s point of view.”
Dano voices the spider in the film, a slightly surreal story about love, loneliness and human fragility. Adam Sandler, with a vaguely pan-Russian accent that one never quite gets used to, receives therapeutic wisdom of the spider while floating in a space station. Back on Earth, the astronaut’s pregnant and unhappy wife (Mulligan again) looks out the window as she mourns what should have been her great love story. The spider asks Sandler’s character where did love go, why he chose isolation, why human beings are such perplexing and bewildering creatures. The astronaut seems destined to become a divisive curiosity on the resumes of everyone involved, but it is also so unusual that it is worth seeing despite everything.
In Dano’s case, that seemed to be his reason for signing. “When I found out he was Adam Sandler in a spaceship talking to a giant spider, I was like… well, OK,” he laughs. “It sounded crazy enough to be something.” So, it’s definitely not the marriage thing? “Gee, I was thinking more about what it’s like to be a spiritual guide, You know?”.
Dano is the type of man who uses the word seriously “damn“in an informal conversation, which It gives him the air of someone between 39 and 86 years old. As a child I also had this quality. Born and raised in New York, Dano was a child actor, especially in theater. In front of the cameras, his characters used to be young people who received beatings for lunch money. In the teen comedy The neighbor next door and in some episodes of The Sopranos played book fools, that is, high school students whom even Matilda Wormwood would call too much of a know-it-all. He didn’t particularly like it.
“If you look at those parts, there is a clear caricature or impression of, you know, ‘dumb guy with glasses’, that…” He leans close to his camera, filling the lens. “As you can see, I am. But I think if he could only do those kinds of roles as an actor, I don’t know if I would want to be an actor. “I think he would have declined.”
The neighbor next doorin which a schoolboy played by Emile Hirsch falls in love with one porn star, took Dano to Los Angeles at age 18. He lived in a luxury hotel for a month and felt lonely. “He was surrounded by other child actors and knew how difficult he could be, but he tried by all means play a longer game. Which is difficult, because you feel like you don’t have control. I don’t think it was confidence on my part, or ego, I think there was just a part of me that felt like I really I wanted to continue doing this in 20 years.”
When the filmmaker Rebecca Miller gave him the role of a potentially dubious boyfriend in The Ballad of Jack and Rose, a dark drama starring Miller’s husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, Dano began to glimpse that future. “I played someone who would consider him not like myself,” he stammers. “It was a little punk rock. Kind of, you know… a tough guy. “It confirmed to me that maybe I could be an actor.”
As he worked with Day-Lewis twice in fairly quick succession -Bloody oil It was filmed two years after Jack y Roseand his role as an anguished, mute teenager in Little Miss Sunshine came in the middle – I guess they must have been friends. “I was not friends with any of Daniel’s characters, so I think a natural distance was maintained,” she says. I mention that the actress Vicky Krieps, who worked with Day-Lewis on the romance The ghost thread, He has also spoken about the distance he maintained with his co-starwhich made the film and the dynamic between its characters brightbut what turned out difficult at the time.
“I think these things sound, out of context, a little different than they are in practice,” Dano says. “It seems very natural. It doesn’t seem like an artificial limit is set.” In Bloody oil, Dano y Day-Lewis They confront each other violently: the first is a snake without a smile, the second a rude capitalist soaked in sweat and oil. “It’s appropriate to say that we were enemies on camera, so off camera it wasn’t about getting to know each other, right? It was about creating distance and intention, and letting those things come together on camera.”
And he continues: “For me, it was never at the expense of anything or anyone. I think sometimes you hear extravagant stories with other actors of the Method. It may sound…” He breaks off. “I think it may sound funny. But all of this felt in service of the material in a way that I thought was really good.”
Perfect, he didn’t end up being Day-Lewis’s best friend. But the movie seemed cement the type of career Dano would end up having: rich character roles, sometimes striking, often off-center, always interesting. She filmed the film while studying English literature at the New School in Manhattan, and returned to campus after production wrapped. It was a way of making films with one foot in and one foot out. Dano could go unnoticed, make music, be as normal as one theoretically can be when most of America has just seen Daniel Day-Lewis tell him he’s had his milkshake.
Over time, Dano has loosened up a bit. Batmanhe says, it was a great career move and personal; until then he had avoided working on that scale. “But I was able to really enjoy it. It wasn’t too much for me. I liked the fervor of the fans. I became a complete Batman nerd.” Even wrote a Riddler comic, published to good reviews in October 2022, which charted his interpretation of the character’s origins.
Today, after Marvels, Madame Web y The Flash, Batman it feels a little like one of the last battles of the superhero genre, that last whiff of money, of pleasing the public, of the goodness of the cape before the franchise fatigue I arrived. Do you have any theories as to why Batman Has he come out of that exhaustion alive? “There are enough comic book movies where you know what to expect. Reading the script for Batman you knew it was a real movie. Every sentence… this is the writer and director Matt Reeves”.
He believes that the current unrest about the world of superheroes is the product of a erratic film industry. “It’s an interesting time where everyone has to think, ‘Well, and now that?’ Let’s hope that from there someone breathes new life into comic book movies, or that it flourishes anything other than superheroes. “I’m sure there will still be some good ones to come, but I think it’s a welcome moment.”
“It’s also something broader,” he continues. “As soon as the word ‘content’ came into what we do – that is, making movies or television – it meant quantity over quality, which I think was a big misstep. And I certainly don’t need that either as a viewer or as an artist.” Dano is impassioned, but his voice retains its placid calm. It may be the most animated he gets when he’s not on a movie set. But does he? who knows?
* Of The Independent From great britain. Special for Page 12.