With the release of his new film Dumb Money, the endlessly versatile actor talks about turning his back on blockbusters, struggling to lie – and exploring his dark side
There is versatility in acting and then there is Paul Dano. No sooner had he been seen last year as the masked, panting, clingfilm-wrapped Riddler, who dispatches his victims with hammers and bombs in The Batman, than he turned up as the placid, moon-faced parent based on Steven Spielberg’s own father in The Fabelmans.
Dano has more than two decades of full-blooded, often deranged performances behind him, such as the wheedling preacher in There Will Be Blood and a suspected child abductor in Prisoners. He has also been fragile and huggable as the silent, surly teen in Little Miss Sunshine, the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy, and Pierre in the BBC’s War and Peace where, as historian Simon Schama put it, his “every blink is a sonata of bewilderment”.
