The one movie Paul Dano never wanted to be in: “Not of the slightest interest to me”
You’ve got to feel for Paul Dano. There he was, hanging out in his house in Brooklyn, minding his own business, maybe drinking a matcha latte or something, when suddenly he’s all over the place due to Quentin Tarantino deciding to announce to the world that he doesn’t think Dano is a very good actor.
Aside from being patently untrue, as a multitude of Dano’s fellow actors came forward to attest to including George Clooney at the Golden Globes, there seemed to be no basis to Tarantino’s description of Dano as “the weakest male actor in the Screen Actor’s Guild” other than the fact he didn’t like his performance in 2007’s There Will be Blood.
Dano was nominated for a Bafta for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for that film, so he must have been doing something right, but Tarantino was having none of it, filing him alongside the equally non-threatening Matthew Lillard and Owen Wilson as one of the ‘weak sauce’ actors he doesn’t care for. Which I suppose is his opinion, and he has a right to express it.
Another reason the Dano criticism seemed out of the blue and bizarre is that the New Yorker is not one to court publicity, plus aside from some of the bigger budget movies he has done, including as The Riddler in 2022’s The Batman, the best of his work lies in some films that passed without much fanfare, but that were excellent movies.
Those include the bizarre Daniel Radcliffe-starring Swiss Army Man, time travel indie Looper with Bruce Willis, and the fantastic Denis Villeneuve thriller Prisoners from 2012, in which Dano was wonderfully creepy as an accused man hunted down by Hugh Jackman.
Dano has also turned his hand to directing, making his debut behind the camera with 2018’s Wildlife, a drama that he co-wrote with his wife Zoe Kazan from a 1990 novel about a 1960s family left to cope after the father leaves them to fight wildfires. Despite the cast being packed full of talent, including Carey Mulligan and Dano’s Prisoners co-star Jake Gyllenhaal, he decided not to appear in the film himself, saying: “That was not of the slightest interest to me. I think I wanted to be just the director. To be really focused on the camera, and working with the actors and the design. Yeah, I did not want to be thinking about (acting).”
Dano hasn’t directed a film in the eight years since Wildlife, perhaps a comment on the process involved in being in charge of a movie when you have only been on the other side of the camera previously for 20 years.
He told the Independent: “I mean, there were times where I remember feeling like I didn’t get any alone time, and as an introvert, I need alone time”.
“Directing is like playing in a band,” he added. “You’re in concert with everybody, and it’s so collaborative, and you’re really trying to get the best out of everybody. You’re being a bit of a parent almost.”
Dano has two films coming up in his more usual role as an actor; there’s Bunker, a psychological thriller starring Stephen Graham, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, and a crime comedy from A24 called The Chaperones, which features Dano alongside Cooper Hoffman, the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman.
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