The two actors that mean everything to Paul Dano: “I loved what those guys were doing”
Paul Dano often feels like an unassuming great. It’s tough to decide who in the moment will become a legend in hindsight, but when looking through his filmography, he’s one of the strongest contenders in the modern age.
Still only relatively young in the grand scheme of things, Dano has already had a lengthy career, too. Starting out playing a troubled teen in L.I.E, he had a real knack for taking what might seem like an archetypal role and giving it depth. Playing Howie, alongside Brian Cox, Dano’s depiction of a young boy grappling with sexuality is full of subtleties.
It’s the same story for his work in Little Miss Sunshine, enduring as one of his most iconic roles despite him only just being an adult when he shot it. Again bringing nuance to the angsty teen, it’s a golden performance in a golden movie.
The miraculous thing, though, is that Dano managed to move beyond that. Performers so often get stuck in one type of character or left behind when they age out of young roles, but as he was brought into Paul Thomas Anderson’s world for There Will Be Blood, his career only opened up more.
There are so many projects I could highlight. In the infectious fun of Ruby Sparks, Dano plays the classic romantic lead with an edge of neuroticism and self-absorption that takes a dig at the whole genre.
In Prisoners, he manages to convey such intense emotions without barely saying a word. In Love & Mercy, he basically did the impossible when he made a music biopic actually good, playing The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and showing his struggles with mental illness devastatingly. Across action, horror, comedy, drama, and all the shades in between, Dano has mastered each one.
Both so did his heroes. “There are maybe 100 actors I look up to, but my first two favourite actors were Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson,” he said, picking out those two names as the ones that always sit at the top of his list.
In both cases, the performers have navigated not only long and iconic careers but also vast ones, also refusing to be typecast or boxed in. While Nicholson could have made an entire career simply playing the creepy guy after his master work in The Shining, he didn’t. Instead, he’s pushed himself again and again, regularly aligning himself with bold projects that came to be culture-defining when the bet paid off.
Similarly, Hoffman could have ridden the coattails of The Graduate forever if he wanted to, but he refused, pushing himself into everything from romantic leads to father figures to villains.
Clearly, Dano’s idolisation lies with people who are similarly varied and want to be that way. As Dano has also moved into directing more and more, both Hoffman and Nicholson can inspire him there, too, serving as reminders that an actor never has to be boxed in.
