“I was so scared”: When Paul Dano needed to sing for Brian Wilson
Playing Brian Wilson in a film would be daunting enough for any actor without much of a musical background. While it’s true that Paul Dano’s acting career began with a role in the musical Ragtime when he was 12 years old, he hasn’t done much singing since – and nothing could prepare him for the part of The Beach Boys’ musical auteur.
It helps that Dano has a decent likeness for the young Wilson, which was the initial reason he was cast in the 2014 biopic Love & Mercy. He also said that he had experience playing a similarly troubled young man with an obsessive focus on a singular goal in the 2007 indie tragicomedy Little Miss Sunshine. But singing pop masterpieces like ‘God Only Knows’ in front of the camera? That’s a whole different story.
And how about singing them to the man himself? Well, Dano had to do just that in preparation for the movie when the pianist from Wilson tour band, Darian Sahanaja, stopped by to check in on how his singing lessons were progressing. “At that point, I’d already been working on my singing quite a bit,” Dano told Entertainment Weekly at the time of Love & Mercy’s general release, “and he was going to help me learn to play the piano as well.”
Sahanaja had another surprise for Dano, though. Out of the blue, he told him, “Okay, I’m going to record something and send it to Brian.” Dano was shocked. “I was like, ‘Whoah! That’s something I should have known about.’” But before he knew it, he was performing one of Wilson’s songs specifically for the Beach Boys legend to hear. “I was so scared,” he admitted.
How did Wilson react to Dano’s singing?
Yet he had nothing to fear. The moment he heard Dano’s voice, Wilson put the actor’s mind at ease with enthusiastic encouragement. “Brian and Melinda [Wilson] called together and they were really excited.”
This moment motivated Dano to throw himself into his role. “Okay, now I can run with this,” he recalled thinking. “If they thought I sounded okay singing these — you know, they’re not easy songs, Brian’s range is just enormous — so if they were excited by that, it felt like it gave me permission to do my thing.” He nailed his performance as Wilson. Especially during the film’s opening scene, in which he had to sing ‘God Only Knows’ while playing it alone on the piano.
What’s more, singing some of The Beach Boys’ greatest songs had a transformative effect on Dano himself. “Singing every day changed my life,” he later told Variety. “I loved it. You’re literally putting the songs in you, you know. They’re resonating through your body.”
Without that aspect of his preparation for Love & Mercy, Dano likely couldn’t have gotten to the heart of the character he was playing. “It was certainly, for me, one of the biggest keys to trying to be Brian.”
For a whole new generation of music and movie lovers, Dano was Brian. Following his performance, it’s difficult to imagine any other actor bringing Wilson’s spellbinding recording sessions for the album Pet Sounds to life in quite the same way.
