Some new roles for a seasoned actor
Paul Dano is busy behind the camera, on Broadway and on the small screen
To the scabrous pile of breakdowns, shutdowns and scandals that will memorialize 2018, a humble submission: Paul Dano, acclaimed 34-year-old actor, did not appear in a single movie.
Granted, this might seem a minor point in the grand scheme. But consider this: To find another 12-month span in which discerning moviegoers were deprived of even one Paul Dano performance — in more generous times, there were as many as four — you would have to go all the way back to 2003, a year when (coincidentally!) Bennifer, Saddam Hussein and the Chingy song “Right Thurr” were on top of the world.
To be fair, Dano didn’t plan things to work out this way. Far from it! He loves movies and they love him right back. For the past decade and a half, he’s been a constant, animating (if not always showy) presence in a run of good and strange films, many involving a winning bingo card of the great contemporary directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Steve McQueen, Ang Lee, Spike Jonze, Denis Villeneuve.
That it’s not Dano’s face — a cherubic, inverted teardrop — that first comes to mind when you think of these movies ( There Will Be Blood, 12 Years a Slave, Prisoners) is a testament to his most durable gift. Filmmakers and audience members alike believe he is one of them.
And now he really is a filmmaker, with the release last fall of Wildlife, Dano’s meticulous and evocative directorial debut, adapted from the 1990 Richard Ford novel and starring his old friends Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal. That’s why the actor failed to visit you at the multiplex last year — he was busy realizing a lifelong dream.
But that’s not all. Hunkering in the editing bay of Wildlife, he missed the physicality of performance. So he accepted an offer — and put on 20 pounds of muscle — to play a tenacious, convicted murderer who tunnels his way out of prison in the seven-episode Showtime limited series Escape at Dannemora with Benicio Del Toro.
And there’s more! Really, Dano has never been so busy. Dannemora shot for a gruelling six months in upstate New York. During that time, another old friend and neighbour, Ethan Hawke, sent him an effusive text about collaborating on a revival of the venerated Sam Shepard play True West. Dano just couldn’t resist — his cup ranneth over. And so he closed out the year in yet a third medium, starring opposite Hawke in the Roundabout Theater Company’s Broadway production, which began previews Dec. 27 and opens Jan. 24.
Twelve months, no movies and an embarrassment of riches. And none of his professional accomplishments compare to his most personal one, the one that inspired Hawke to observe in a phone interview that his friend was “truly becoming himself”: Paul Dano became a dad.
Early on a December morning in the Boerum Hill neighbourhood of Brooklyn, where Dano and his partner, actress and writer Zoe Kazan, have lived for nearly a decade, I met him at a handsome restaurant with dark wood panelling and an antique bar.
He was getting over a cold and had a 4-month-old at home — he and Kazan, with whom he co-wrote Wildlife, welcomed Alma in August. But Dano was warm and genial, brightening as he began to report on his fledgling days of fatherhood.
“I didn’t think I would like it so much; I mean, I thought I would like it, but it’s really quite astonishing,” he said. In a crisp, black-and-blue flannel, a nest of light-brown hair and olive librarian glasses he could have passed as an adjunct at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “There’s just a sort of ... I don’t know, a hope or something.”
On the 10th floor of a Times Square office building, two weeks before previews for True West were to begin, Dano and Hawke were running lines in a makeshift, fluorescent-lit rehearsal space.
Dano appears in every minute of the two-hour play and was already feeling it: “It’s the greatest challenge I’ve ever had as an adult actor on stage,” he said.
The older brother in the play, Lee, played by Hawke, is a feral and felonious hustler, the antithesis of Dano’s younger, starch-collared Austin. The actors were well matched to their parts. In rehearsal, Hawke was a bee in a meadow, pacing excitedly, pogoing from one scene interpretation to the next. Dano, who seemed almost too tall to fit into the fake kitchen, was comparatively dispassionate, soft-spoken.
True West, first produced in 1980, has made memorable brotherhoods of Tommy Lee Jones and Peter Boyle, Gary Sinise and John Malkovich, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, among others. It hinges on a comic reversal and, by the end of nine scenes, it’s Austin’s animal instincts that prove the most vicious.
The character’s turn from meek to maniacal is classic Dano. In his two most famous roles, as a conniving preacher in There Will Be Blood, and as an electively mute goth in Little Miss Sunshine, he plays diligent, abstemious men whose tight lids obscure bubbling waters.
The play’s director, James Macdonald, said it was the actor’s whiplash-inducing emotional range that won him the job.
Dano has heard these appraisals before.
“It’s not conscious,” he insist- ed, back at the restaurant in Brooklyn, when I theorized that he had a type. “But I do enjoy layers — digging around, asking why, figuring it out. If it’s really clear what a character needs, I feel a little less intoxicated by it.”