Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘García Márquez taught me the exquisite power of stories’
My earliest reading memoryI was about eight, reading a Famous Five book by Enid Blyton, in the light-filled room downstairs in our house on the campus of the University of Nigeria. I learned to read earlier, but this is the earliest of my abiding memories of reading: the feeling of singular pleasure, page after page, eager to solve the mystery in the dungeon but unwilling for the story to end.
My favourite book growing upI fell deeply in love with The Dark Child by Camara Laye, which probably sparked my interest in a certain kind of nostalgia in fiction. I also loved the Pacesetters, a series of YA books by different African writers, because reading them made me begin to have a (positive) panAfrican sensibility.
The book that changed me as a teenagerMy best friend’s brother gave me a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I had never had such a visceral reaction to a book. I will never forget the feeling, a kind of bodily frisson, when I read the passage about the character who ascends into heaven. It taught me the exquisite power of stories, their ability to engage your imagination and permanently stamp things on your mind in a way that nothing else can.
The writer who changed my mindI read White Rage by Carol Anderson about six years ago. Before then I had always believed in the idea of reparations for African Americans, but in a vague, probably not practical way. This beautifully written history made me think differently.
The book I rereadChinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, because it is a superb example of what literature can, or even should, do: inform and delight.
The book I could never read againI adored the crime fiction novels by James Hadley Chase when I was younger. I tried to reread them some years ago and just couldn’t get past the first page.
The book I discovered later in lifeThe Beautiful Mrs Seidenman by Andrzej Szczypiorski. This wide-ranging, grown-up novel about Poland during the second world war had an intense effect on me, perhaps because I was at the time researching the Nigerian-Biafran war, a subject close to my heart as both my grandfathers died in that war.
The book I am currently readingI read more than one book at a time, proof perhaps of that modern affliction of the short attention span, and I don’t finish everything I start. But I’m enjoying Payback by Mary Gordon and The Road to Lichfield by Penelope Lively, and will finish both because they are so well done, psychologically acute and wise. I have just started The Jungle by a brilliant Nigerian investigative journalist, David Hundeyin. And, as necessary reminders of the beauty in language, I am dipping in and out of poetry collections by Rita Dove, Jack Gilbert and Leanne O’Sulllivan.
My comfort readI relax by catching up on my backlog of two magazines: the Atlantic and the New Yorker, knowing that with each one I open, there is the possibility of something gem-like within.
• Mama’s Sleeping Scarf by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writing as Nwa Grace-James, illustrated by Joelle Avelino, is published by HarperCollins (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. charges may apply.
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gable 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 39year-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-yearolds 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
the table to take that up to £65k – and still they strike, putting their own jobs at risk.”
Aslef last met formally with industry figures from the Rail Delivery Group, the body that represents train operators, in April. These will be the drivers’ 12th and 13th 24-hour strikes since July 2022 in the national pay dispute.
An offer of 8% over two years, tied to changes to working conditions, was dismissed by Aslef earlier this year. The government and industry said it should be put to a full ballot but the union said it would ballot only on an offer it recommended, and drivers have since overwhelmingly voted to continue strikes.
A spokesperson for the Rail Delivery Group said: “We want to give our staff a pay increase, but it has always been linked to implementing necessary, sensible reforms that would enhance services for our passengers.
“We ask the Aslef leadership and executive to recognise the very real financial challenge the industry is facing and work with us to deliver a more reliable and robust railway for the future.”
A Department for Transport spokesperson said the government had “facilitated fair and reasonable offers”, adding: “Further strike action will not only put a strain on taxpayers, but risk driving passengers away from the network for good. These strikes will not prevent the need for essential workplace reforms.”
The RMT union, which represents about 20,000 staff working on stations or as onboard crew for the same train operators in England, has yet to confirm if it will also stage strikes during the Conservative conference.