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(Picture: Chieska Fortune Smith )Paul Dano attracts a few curious looks as he arrives at the Rosewood hotel.
The 37-year-old actor in a worn-out black hoodie has played such a wide range of characters that people can’t pin down where they recognise him from. He was the taciturn Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine, both Paul and Eli Sunday in There Will be Blood and Brian Wilson in Love and Mercy (he put on so much weight for that role that he tore a ligament in his leg trying to play basketball). Even IMDb doesn’t know what box to put him in, describing him as an actor who ‘often plays characters who receive beatings’, which makes him laugh.
But Dano may be about to lose his anonymity: he stars in the most highly anticipated superhero blockbuster of the year, The Batman, giving a powerfully chilling performance as The Riddler. This is a villain who seems deceptively unassuming in his navy parka and clear-framed specs — but you shouldn’t underestimate the geek. Dano is already receiving ‘incredible’ fan mail from Batman acolytes.
‘Being in a movie like that was a pretty big box to check,’ he says in his New York accent. ‘It was emotional.’
Dano has met me straight off the red-eye from the United States and apologises for his ‘plane brain’. He wondered if he was hallucinating when he landed and saw that Cafe Nero is doing a Riddler-themed coffee. Being alone on the five-hour flight, ‘was a little break’ from parenthood — he has a three-year-old daughter, Alma, with fellow actor Zoe Kazan. And he is glad to be in London (The Batman was filmed here, as well as in Glasgow) and is weighing up whether it’s a Covid risk to go to the theatre and see his friend Eddie Redmayne in Cabaret (Redmayne has babysat Alma).
So how do you play a character who is bad to the bone? First of all, he forgot everything he knew about other Batman villains, played by Heath Ledger and Jim Carrey (a childhood hero of Dano’s, along with Jack Nicholson).
Dano is a polite, thoughtful man. He has a method approach to acting, which can be physically and mentally draining: ‘I don’t know if it’s easier or better but I like to keep the energy of the character close.’ During There Will be Blood, he and Day-Lewis didn’t talk because that wasn’t in keeping with their roles. For The Batman, that meant reading widely about good and evil, and trauma, of which The Batman and The Riddler have a shared experience.
Spreading hummus on to pitta and offering me some — ‘in case you feel like a snack’ — he tells me that he doesn’t think The Riddler was ‘born a psycho’, ‘although people can have chemical imbalances. With my character there was a lack of nurture, in abusive situations.’
The film’s director, Matt Reeves, told Dano he thought of The Riddler as a serial killer. They discussed the Zodiac Killer, who operated anonymously in 1960s California and Dano read Mindhunter, about the FBI’s serial crime unit. ‘But it didn’t resonate. I felt The Riddler’s sense of purpose had to be greater.’ So he went on social media and delved into the world of incels and toxic masculinity. In the film, we see how online forums are a place where those who feel they are on the fringes can feel they finally belong and have agency.
‘I’m not on social media so it felt quite potent,’ he says. ‘I found what people were saying on Reddit and Twitter the scariest part of the film, even more frightening than the violence, because it is the most real. I tried not to go too far down the rabbit hole of how facts and science can be interpreted in different ways but it is fascinating. There are people who feel unheard, unseen and angry. It’s horrible and I don’t know what we do about it.’
The most important message in the film for Dano is about vengeance. ‘It is indicting Batman and the viewer — we are enjoying vengeance and that is wrong. It eats you up.’
Even though The Batman was written five years ago, it feels relevant, with corrupt officials — ‘broke’ is graffitied on Gotham City Hall — and disillusionment with the patriarchy. ‘This is a different type of superhero film,’ says Dano. ‘Superhero films are always protecting the status quo. I don’t think this does that. But there are no easy answers. Every generation thinks it is living in the most interesting time but this is quite a chapter in history.’
It was also his idea for The Riddler to wrap his head in cling film — to prevent DNA being left at crime scenes. ‘It was brutal,’ he says. ‘It felt totally suffocating. I was concerned about my skull the first day but we learnt to live with it.’
The intensity of the filming was part of the job but he bats it off. ‘It is sometimes hard to come down but I imagine it’s hard for an athlete to come down from a game. There’s so much that you fill up on and then you’re trying to release. You’re operating at a temperature that’s different from your everyday life.’ Dano’s normal routine sounds like a domestic idyll: he and Kazan live in Brooklyn, she likes watching The Great British Bake Off and he makes the family pancakes on Saturday mornings.
Being a father has changed his approach to work. ‘When you come across a dark character like The Riddler you think twice. Because there is part of you that has to stay in contact with the role while filming. But we are just two working parents trying to figure out how to be the parents we want to be and be the artists we want to be. Kids keep you present because if you’re not, they let you know pretty quickly. It’s nice to be with them and it is nice if there’s a day where you need space — there’s businessmen who travel and are away from their family. There’s a nice enough way to manage it.’
Dano liked comics as a child (‘I was an X-Men kid’) and fell in love with the Batman books while filming but his daughter is too young for that he says, ‘other than the Octonauts, they’re superheroes, kind of’. He won’t generalise about whether he and Kazan have different experiences with juggling childcare and work as men and women. ‘My guess is that it is more challenging for her. Male work has been romanticised and if a woman wants something she’s a diva, right? We try not to work at the same time if we can. This past year we had to because it was a special opportunity for both of us, I don’t know if that choice would be the same in 2022.’
Kazan is about to star in She Said, based on the book about the journalists who exposed Harvey Weinstein’s abuse. Dano met her when they did an off-Broadway play together. Her paternal grandfather was the Streetcar Named Desire director Elia Kazan — what’s it like having such famous in-laws? ‘I liked Zoe. We’ve been together a long time. I still like her. It doesn’t have any impact except sometimes you are in a theatre and you hear somebody reciting the actor’s vow by her grandfather.’
The couple starred together in Ruby Sparks, a 2012 rom-com that she wrote but they aren’t in a rush to work together again. ‘Definitely not all the time,’ he says. ‘When the only conversation happening between us is work you lose something in the relationship. To act together, it would have to be something that was meaningful to us, or a point in family life where we felt, “Let’s just f***ing be together.”’
Dano grew up in New York and then the suburbs, where the family could afford a bigger home. His father was a financial adviser (who enrolled in an acting class in his 20s to meet women, much to Dano’s amusement) and his mother raised Dano and his sister. He wanted to be a professional basketball player and still plays although ‘coming out of the pandemic, I’d like to go to the Y and have a bunch of sweaty dudes, I don’t know, like, breathing hard on me — I just don’t know that I’m there yet. Maybe when my kid is vaxxed.’
Music is what got him into acting (he sings a beautiful Ave Maria in The Batman) and he was spotted performing in a musical, making his Broadway debut in 1996, aged 12, in a play called Inherit the Wind. When he was 17 he was in the film LIE with Brian Cox.
Even then, he thought carefully about roles. ‘There was a lot I was aware of at a young age. I didn’t want to act unless I could survive the young actor part and do it when I was older as well.’ He has seen Licorice Pizza and much of its depiction of young actors on screen rang true. He has said he gets irritated if people lose out on roles for superficial reasons, although women have it a lot worse.
The film that ‘was a turning point’ was the 2005 indie comedy The Ballad of Jack and Rose, in which he played a teenager adjusting to Daniel Day-Lewis’s character Jack going out with his mother. Dano was 18. ‘I thought I’d only be playing dorky guys with glasses — that’s how I saw myself. But that part, working with Daniel, that was the hand on my shoulder I needed to say, “You can do this, you can play anything.” Then we did There Will be Blood. My memory of that is more like a fever dream. It was summer in Texas and we did six-day weeks.”
Next, he is stepping into a role inspired by Steven Spielberg’s father, Arnold, in The Fableman; Michelle Williams plays his wife. Arnold, an electrical engineer, died in 2020, aged 103. What’s it like playing someone so close to the director? ‘It such a gift after this to get to go work with a part of me that I want to be closer to, as a parent. Arnold is a really beautiful character. I think there’s a kind soul in there and a real American man.
‘Steven and I talked a lot about him. He was wonderful, really open. This was really a brave and vulnerable film for all of us.’ Having played The Riddler, Dano would like to do a comedy next. Would he like to be a romantic lead? ‘I don’t know if I’m the first person that gets thought of for that. The actor I am allows for variety and that is what gets me excited.’
