When Paul Dano’s method acting stopped him sleeping: “My head was just throbbing with heat”
Throughout his career, Paul Dano’s “method” approach to his craft has led to some truly breathtaking performances. Take, for example, his soulful turn as the late Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy, his perfect encapsulation of a mixed-up teenager with greater aspirations in Little Miss Sunshine, or his skin-crawling inhabiting of a potential child kidnapper in Prisoners; Dano’s process helps him imbue every role with reality and verisimilitude.
According to Dano, his approach to acting, which involves an incredible amount of research and doing everything he can to plumb a character’s emotional depths, can sometimes be exhausting. It can also lead to absurd situations when he encounters other method actors, such as when he and Daniel Day-Lewis, the poster boy for method acting, refused to speak to each other when the cameras weren’t rolling on There Will Be Blood. “I don’t know if it’s easier or better, but I like to keep the energy of the character close,” Dano reasoned to the Evening Standard in 2022.
When Dano signed up to make by far and away his biggest movie in October 2019, though, he probably didn’t anticipate quite how far down the rabbit hole it would take him. By agreeing to play a new incarnation of The Riddler in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, Dano opened himself up to a research process that included serial killers, in particular the infamous Zodiac killer who terrorised San Francisco; the grubby online world of incels and toxic masculinity; a deep dive into Nirvana; and “tons of comic books.” Indeed, that was one of the nicer surprises about playing the role. Dano, who had been a fan of the X-Men as a kid but hadn’t read comics for a long time, became so enamoured of Batman’s comic book escapades that he eventually wrote one himself – The Riddler: Year One was published by DC in 2022/23.
However, getting into the Riddler’s headspace every day on set turned out to be considerably less fun. Reeves’ interpretation of the character was no Jim Carrey-esque flamboyant trickster in a green leotard, after all. Instead, this Riddler was a masked serial killer driven by political and social ideology to expose the corruption at the heart of Gotham City, and to do that, he hatches an elaborate scheme that begins with bludgeoning the Mayor to death.
“There were some nights that I probably didn’t sleep as well as I would’ve wanted to,” Dano confessed to Entertainment Weekly, “Just because it was a little hard to come down from this character. It takes a lot of energy to get there. And so you almost have to sustain it once you’re there because going up and down is kind of hard.”
Interestingly, Dano found one particularly unusual way to sustain the heightened intensity of playing The Riddler, but to his chagrin, it quickly backfired on him. He and Reeves came up with the idea that the killer would wrap cling film around his body and face so he didn’t risk leaving any DNA at his crime scenes. So, Dano dutifully tested this out by covering his head in plastic wrap underneath a crude, homemade leather mask and glasses.
However, after only an hour in costume under the baking set lights, Dano was forced to rip the mask off because he was getting stiflingly hot. In fact, Reeves was taken aback when he saw Dano’s “beet read” face beneath the cling film. “My head was just throbbing with heat,” Dano admitted. “I went home that night, after the first full day in that, and I almost couldn’t sleep because I was scared of what was happening to my head. It was, like, compressed from the sweat, and the heat, and the lack of oxygen. It was a crazy feeling.”
Amazingly, this worrying first day, which made Dano feel like his head was going to burst, didn’t stop him from persisting with the cling film idea. Thankfully, though, the costume department found a workaround that allowed more oxygen to penetrate the mask, which made it bearable for the actor.
Through some sleepless nights and a lot of delving into the twisted mind of a killer, Dano wound up creating an indelible take on a classic comic book character – and thankfully for his family, he didn’t embrace the “method” so far that he stayed in character away from set. “I have a kid,” he chuckled to NME. “I’m not going home and acting like I do in the film.”
