The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Time to step out of the shadows
Paul Dano made his name playing ‘icky, mucky’ oddballs – so why did Steven Spielberg cast him as his father in ‘The Fabelmans’?
When Steven Spielberg asked Paul Dano to play his father in The Fabelmans, a film about the director’s own childhood, the 38-year-old actor took it as “the biggest of compliments”. After all, says Dano, Spielberg is “one of the greatest filmmakers of all time”. But also, he adds, “it meant a lot that he wanted me to play this thoughtful and loving human being, because for whatever reason, many of the parts I’m best known for have” – he pauses, frowns – “not been that”.
That’s some understatement. Dano’s first notable role was in the 2006 comedy Little Miss Sunshine, in which he cut against the film’s upbeat mood as a Nietzsche-mad teen. His real breakthrough, however, came one year later in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, as the fire-breathing Pentecostal
prophet Eli Sunday, sloshing holy water over the oil-blackened brow of Daniel Day-Lewis. (Anderson had originally slotted Dano into the smaller role of Eli’s guileful brother Paul, but promoted him two weeks into the shoot after the actor initially cast as Eli was fired).
In the years since, Dano has been a psychopathic slave owner in 12 Years a Slave, a suspected child abductor in Prisoners, and a convicted murderer serving a life sentence in Escape at Dannemora. In last year’s The Batman, his version of the Riddler was a fleshcreeping melange of the Zodiac serial killer and a homicidal incel, dressed head to toe in army surplus and live-streaming his crimes to an online army of followers.
From whence did this uncommon knack for darkness spring? Dano looks genuinely at a loss by the question, as if asked about something notorious a cousin once did, to which he’d deliberately not given too much thought.
“I’m really not sure,” he says finally. “Because I don’t think I come across like that in life. I mean, I hope I don’t look like a monster to you.” It’s a reasonable point. Sitting in the kitchen of his Brooklyn apartment, wearing a zip-up fleece and a woolly hat pulled over his tousled new-father hair – he and his partner, the actress Zoe Kazan (right), welcomed their second child 11 weeks ago – Dano strikes me as the sort of chap who makes a mean quiche, or with whom you’d swap fermentation tips in the queue for the coffee shop.
“I always approach those parts by trying to understand why they are who they are, and I’m usually able to find a way in,” he concedes. “But if there’s a proficiency there…” He tails off. “It’s not something I can explain.”
That’s why he was so grateful to Spielberg. “Many of the most meaningful parts to me have actually been the opposite of There Will Be Blood, and everything that led to. So Steven asking me to play his father was important. I don’t think all I am is that shadow side.” Perhaps it’s precisely because Dano comes across as so normal and decent in person that on screen we read his soft, round, calm countenance as a mask, concealing dark ulterior motives. One of the most unsettling moments in The Batman was a simple shot of the Riddler in his cell, a gentle smile playing on his face. It was terrifying not because he seemed dangerous or savage – but because he seemed fine.
Anyway, Dano really does seem fine today, and understandably so, since his performance in The Fabelmans – and indeed the film as a whole, now considered an Oscars frontrunner following victory at the Golden Globes this week – is one of the brightest jewels in the winter cinema schedules. It exists thanks to a comment made by the writer Tony Kushner while he and Spielberg were on the set of Munich back in 2004. Spielberg had told Kushner about a supremely awkward moment in his teens: he’d realised
his mother was having an affair with a family friend called Bernie Adler after noticing how the two were behaving together in a home movie he had shot.
It immediately struck Kushner as an artistically formative moment in the life of a filmmaker whose fascination with broken families had bled into films as different as ET: The Extra-Terrestrial and the Indiana Jones series.
“Someday you’re going to have to make a film about this,” Kushner counselled – and 16 years later they found themselves doing just that, thrashing out a screenplay over Zoom during the first 2020 lockdown. Early the following year, Spielberg arranged a video call with Dano to sound him out for the role of Burt Fabelman, a lightly fictionalised analogue of his father Arnold. He’d already cast Michelle Williams as his mother – called Mitzi on screen, and Leah in life – after seeing her soul-searing performance as an unhappy wife in 2010’s Blue Valentine. But when it came to Dano, Spielberg’s interest had been sparked more by what the actor hadn’t yet done on screen, after friends told him how upright and introspective Dano was away from his renowned weirdo roles.
Dano grimaces. He’s reluctant “to start talking about myself in a way that will sound prima-donna-ish”, but says that when Spielberg offered him the role “I could see in his eyes what this film meant to him, and what was personally at stake.” Spielberg made it clear that he wasn’t looking for an impersonation, or the sort of transformative effort that would have required Dano to gain weight. (Arnold Spielberg, who died in August 2020 at the ripe old age of 103, was a sturdy second-generation Ukrainian Jewish immigrant.) Instead, he simply handed Dano the key to his family archives. Inside he found two invaluable interviews given by Arnold, who was himself a notable figure: he served in India in the Second World War with the US Army Signal Corps before designing early computers for IBM and General Electric.
Arnold’s work required the Spielberg family to move regularly during Steven’s childhood: from Ohio to New Jersey to Arizona, then on to the future Silicon Valley in northern California where Arnold’s genius for electronics could flourish. I ask if this struck a chord with Dano, whose family also uprooted from a cramped Manhattan apartment to various Connecticut suburbs during his childhood. (His father was a low-level financial adviser; his mother a housewife.) But he demurs: the film spoke less to him about his past, than about where he is right this moment. “It was about what it means to be a husband and a father. Even though the film itself has a beautiful nostalgia to it, the themes felt very present-tense.”
Spielberg’s parents divorced in 1966, when the director was 19 years old. Though the affair was his mother’s, it was his father he rejected; they were estranged for the next 15 (2016, TV)
years. Dano says he tried to capture this “undertow of discomfort” in his scenes with Gabriel LaBelle, who plays the teenage Sammy Fabelman: “I think his father fell on his sword, in a way. He was containing what he was feeling, either because he didn’t know how to express it or for his family’s sake.” He gained a fresh awareness, he says, “of the way it’s perfectly possible for people to love each other and their kids and for a marriage still not to last”.
Dano’s favourite roles, he says, are those that allow him to cultivate certain qualities within himself: with Burt it was his cool-headedness and rationality, which has proven indispensable since the arrival of child number two. So what does playing, say, a comic-book supervillain bring to his parenting game?
“Well,” he starts, uncertainly. “As dark as that character was, there was an element of deliciousness. I think, even though we tried to bring depth to the Riddler, there was also a little mischief.” Even so, he continues, he finds playing evil increasingly difficult: (2014)
“It’s a completely different ball game than when I was in my 20s and could psychologically throw myself around.” Since becoming a father in 2018 (his elder daughter Alma is now four), “I’ve stopped keeping those books at my bedside at night. The reading about trauma and serial killers or whatever has to be kept to working hours, because I know I also have to be a father.”
He had previously been courted to play other comic-book villains: “There were flirtations that didn’t quite work out, and others I chose not to do.” But director Matt Reeves’s script for The Batman was obviously different: “It was all so fully realised on the page. Because it was a superhero film, and they make so many, I guess I wasn’t expecting something so…” – he reaches for the right word – “good. You know, it was a real movie. A little risky, and socially relevant.”
His guiding principle when choosing roles “is a belief in the whole and not just the part, so to speak”. Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners (2013) tested this approach to the limit; instinctively, Dano felt that playing a suspected child abductor would be too much. “But in the end I did it because I believed in the film,” he says. “Honestly, I didn’t like the idea of it at all. Because when you have to get in there, it’s icky, and it’s mucky.”
The experience was so gruelling that, during the shoot in Atlanta, he started writing a screenplay in his hotel room at night, as an imaginative escape. It was an adaptation of
the Richard Ford novel Wildlife, which, funnily enough, is about a teenager coming to terms with his mother’s infidelity in the 1960s US suburbs. In 2018, Dano went on to direct it himself, subtly and beautifully, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan as the splintering parents. In those dark Atlanta evenings, he and Kazan would swat drafts back and forth by email. “Normally during a shoot there’s no time or space to think about anything else,” he says. “But on that one I needed something to keep me company.”
The cost of staying in character isn’t as steep these days, though there was one moment on The Fabelmans where the work exacted a toll, of sorts. In the final scene, the director David Lynch turns up in a surprising bit part: Dano the actor was desperate to slip onto set and watch the Mulholland Drive maestro at work, but in the end he decided this kind of hero-worship would tug him too far out of Burt’s level-headed mindset.
“Paul wanted to step out of the bubble, but I stayed away for Burt’s sake,” he says ruefully. “Willing yourself into that state of delusion, where you’re not yourself any more…” He looks behind him into the kitchen, where Kazan is pottering around, carrying their newborn in a sling; then continues, not altogether regretfully: “It’s a little harder now than it once was.”
‘I could see in Steven’s eyes what this film meant to him and what was at stake’