Paul Dano

About

Paul Dano arrives in a scene and something in the room's pressure changes. Watch him as Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine -- wound so tight you can see the seams, every polite refusal a hairline fracture. Then watch him split himself in two for There Will Be Blood, playing Paul and Eli Sunday as mirror images of hunger: one desperate to be seen, one desperate to be believed. The BAFTA nomination came because he made you feel the difference. He has spent twenty years perfecting the art of the coiled performer. In Prisoners he is Alex Jones, a man whose interior life has been so thoroughly flattened by fear that every word costs him. In 12 Years a Slave, as John Tibeats, he brings a particular kind of casual cruelty -- the violence of someone who has never had to think about his power. Love & Mercy let him play Brian Wilson's fragility without sentimentality, finding the strength in surrender. What connects these is restraint so precise it reads as transformation. In The Batman he became Edward Nashton -- all surveillance-footage monotone and phosphorescent intensity, a man living in the gap between what he observes and what he can bear. He is a cheese that has been aged until it has developed a complex rind: the surface is hard and particular, but underneath there is a sharpness that catches you off guard. The longer you hold it, the more it reveals.