zoom with paul dano just before mid - night my time, in the Philippines, ten in the morning his time, in New York. We both look gently disheveled at opposite ends of the day. I am jetlagged, and he has just started another day in “baby town,” af- ter waking up every two hours of the night to tend to his newborn, who his partner, fellow writer and actor Zoe Kazan, had in October of this year.Their first child is only four years-old, thus the young parents have been especially conscious about work-life balance, taking longer intervals between all-consuming film projects and, in Dano’s case, engaging with other mediums he can invest himself in from home—also in Octo- ber, he released the first issue of The Riddler: Year One , his limited comic series inspired by the backstory he created in prepara- tion to play the eponymous villain in Matt Reeves’ The Batman . That his research for a role could be turned into a project on its own is a testament to how seriously Dano immerses himself into every performance. Dano’s Riddler is less cartoonish than Jim Carrey’s broad interpretation of the same character, aka Edward Nygma, in Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever. Carrey’s Riddler, an antisocial tech company CEO donning a neon green onesie pocked with question marks, invents and mass distrib- utes a kind of VR headset that jacks sounds and images right into the user’s brain, thus
giving the Riddler access to customers’ memories, secrets, and information. Looking back at the setup, it presaged today’s exploitation and surveillance of metadata, of which Dano’s Riddler is a product. Resembling a too plugged-in, redpilled incel pushed over the edge, Edward Nashton (the more grounded real name of Dano’s Riddler) feels dis- turbingly possible—not a supervillain who is above the simple, blunt force of a hammer. Although Carrey and Dano’s approach to the character, let alone their overall ca- reers and acting styles, are obviously distinct from each other, when I ask him about formative actors and performances that he may have tried to recreate or imitate growing up he says, “The first thing I thought of when you said that actually is Jim Carrey, being obsessed with Ace Ventura and Dumb and Dumber . Even though that’s not the kind of work I do as a professional now.” Looking up at the ceiling with his mouth gently leaning on his fingers, the next actor he thinks of, inadvertently sticking to the Batman universe, is Jack Nicholson, specifically his role in Five Easy Pieces , which he acknowledges is a common touchstone for many actors. But even before the movies, the New York-born and based Dano says, “My first memory to do with acting is the feeling of when the lights go down and the curtains are about to open—that sense of anticipation of what’s about to happen.” Enter Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans , an autobiographical fiction about a boy growing up enraptured by the movies, which captures the wonder of formative first watches and experiences, and is currently enjoying a global theatrical release. Dano plays Burt Fabelman, the character inspired by Spielberg’s real father Arnold. Burt’s son, Sam- my (Mateo Zoryan as a toddler, Gabriel LaBelle as a teen), like the real Spielberg, is changed forever by his first moviegoing experience, The Greatest Show on Earth —specifi- cally the train wreck sequence, which he rushes to recreate with a toy train set and Super 8mm camera. For the rest of the duration, Sammy dreams of making it in the movies. “I did not have one lightning bolt moment the way that Steven did,” Dano tells me. Making his Broadway debut in Inherit the Wind when he was just 12 years-old, he joined the big leagues perhaps before he had to dream too long about making them. Before then he sang in school, did community theater, and got into a regional play. On the subject of influential first watches, I think it relevant to tell Dano his perfor- mances in Little Miss Sunshine and There Will Be Blood left a big impression on me growing up, particularly the latter. On the latter, I had not seen anything like his beguilingly and appropriately histrionic performance as the gangling preacher Eli Sunday, playing oppo-
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