If you saw a tallish, thin young guy limping around this year’s Toronto Film Festival, it was probably Paul Dano. The actor, recovering from recent knee surgery, was in town for three different premieres.
Dano co-stars in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, playing big scenes with Hugh Jackman and Chiwetel Ejiofor respectively. And he was also around for The F Word, which stars his partner, Zoe Kazan.
When we talk, he’s reclining awkwardly in an interview suite at the Shangri-La, resting the leg but otherwise animated and engaged in conversation. You can’t help but root for the guy, even when he’s playing monsters.
So you’re looking very fashionable, with the cane and everything.
Yeah, I just had knee surgery. It’s still gonna swell a bit. I gotta build the muscles back up, so I’m limping around, I’m rockin’ a cane, y’know.
What happened?
Well, I tore my ACL playing basketball – I play a couple of times a week, or I try to. It’s the one exercise that I really love, so it’s just a bummer. I put on some weight for this part in May, and I think my scrawny self was not up to it.
What was the part?
I played Brian Wilson, in a film about him. He was a little chubbier than I. So I did rehab to get rid of my limp and have some strength there, and I got the surgery right after I finished the film.
And now you’re at TIFF with key roles in Prisoners, where you play the suspected kidnapper of two small children, and 12 Years A Slave, where you’re a generally horrible plantation hand. Why do you want us to hate you?
[laughing] Well…
I guess the proper question is why casting directors see you as this awful person.
I have no clue. I know that for me, I questioned [the casting] on both films, even though they were people I wanted to work with. You look at the part in 12 Years A Slave, you finish that script – I mean, it’s a powerful story. You go, “Man, I have to play a bad character in this.” And then you go, “Well, do I want to play a bad character and contribute to a good story?” And to get to work with Steve and Chiwetel – that’s a treat.
So the audience’s response doesn’t factor in?
I never think about the audience’s reception in that regard. It’s more about: what’s the film that’s trying to be made? What are we making? So I feel really lucky to have a part in 12 Years A Slave, and hopefully have an impact on the story, on the viewer’s experience. Seeing the film get received here [so] well, it feels good to me.
It’s the same with Prisoners – that one I was really suspicious of. “Are we gonna treat the subject matter seriously? Is this just gonna be a cheap thrill, or are we actually going to explore what these characters are going through?”
And after meeting Denis, it was clear that he and I saw the same things. He’s the real deal, I think, as a filmmaker. I love working with other actors, and it makes such a big difference who the cast is, but you’re trusting the director the most. They’re the final author. So to give myself over to guys like Denis and Steve is my pleasure. I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t with those guys.
The morality in 12 Years A Slave is pretty straightforward, and you’re playing a character who’s unambiguously evil. With Prisoners, it’s a lot cloudier. Hugh Jackman’s character is certain you’ve taken his kid, but the audience isn’t allowed to be sure.
That was the turn-on for me, the morality in it. You like somebody one second, then maybe you question their actions. Or you don’t like somebody at first, and then maybe you feel sympathy toward them. In tragedy, it’s hard to find a good resolution it’s not black and white, it’s a big fog of gray. I think a lot of people, so far, are like, “Would I do that?” There’s a lot of questions that are being asked, and it’s impossible to answer them.
You spend a lot of time buried under latex in that movie, the result of being savagely, repeatedly beaten by Jackman’s character. How do you prepare for something like that?
Luckily it was only a few days of the makeup stuff. Definitely, once it’s on, it helps you do your job. You see yourself in the mirror and you know the impact that it has on your scene partners and the audience. It takes a little bit of patience, you know, early in the morning – but once it’s on, it’s worth it.
Those scenes, it’s hard to prepare. It’s sort of mysterious. I definitely did a lot of preparation for this character, and that was the painful part. Once we got to work, you do the scenes, it’s almost a release of that. But to live with the subject matter, a guy who’s so withdrawn and fearful…. If you think about his life before the film, that’s not a fun thing to think about. And to think that this actually happens to people, there’s a great weight to it. So doing the scenes was actually a release of sort of what you put inside you.
And what about the physical side of it? The choreography of the beatings? How did that go?
It’s like a bit of a fever dream, in retrospect. Some pretty intense days in a little room it was probably hot and bloody. You know, it’s hard to remember all the details, but I think we all wanted the best scene possible – me and Hugh and Terrence [Howard] and Denis and whoever else was there.
You talked about trusting your scene partners. I’m assuming there was an awful lot of trust between you and Jackman in that room.
Hugh’s such a good man – if you talk to him for 30 seconds, you know that – and a really good actor, and we both loved Denis, so there was a level of trust where it’s sort of like, “Okay, the safer we feel doing this, the more dangerous we can be.”
Trust is a big thing, and you just go for it.
