Batman’s Paul Dano: ‘I thought I’d only be playing dorky guys with glasses’

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.’

‘The Batman’ is in cinemas on 4 March