PAUL DANO'S Midlife Catharsis

He spent years playing oddballs and outsiders, thoughtfully keeping Hollywood at bay. Now, with star-making roles in The Batman and a buzzy new Spielberg film, Paul Dano is shifting into a different gear—and finding a surprising new peace with fame.

- Daniel Riley

JUST AFTER PAUL DANO’S 22nd birthday, in the summer of 2006, the actor flew from New York to El] Paso and made the long drive to the set of There Will Be Blood. He had been cast in a small role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic Western as the business-savvy brother of Eli Sunday, the film’s preacher-antagonist to Daniel Day-Lewis’s ravenous oilman, Daniel Plainview. Dano’s character, Paul, had just one scene, and once Dano filmed it, he planned to head back home to prepare for his final year of college. But something on the set was amiss. After three weeks of shooting, the actor playing the much bigger role of Eli Sunday wasn’t working out. It just wasn’t the right fit,” Anderson explained later. And so when Dano arrived in Texas, Anderson approached him with a wild proposal: What if he played Eli too?

The Sunday brothers would be twins now. And Dano would have only the weekend to prepare for the most significant acting opportunity of his life. I suppose the advantage is not having time to get nervous,” Dano says now. Over the weekend, then, Dano paced the frontier buildings of the film’s Sunday Ranch, sat among the fresh timber in Eli’s house of worship, and rapidly learned the movements of his scenes—feeling his way into the spirit of the revivalist showman who leads the Church of the Third Revelation, and preparing to go toe-to-toe with perhaps the greatest living actor in perhaps his greatest ever role.

Over the remainder of the summer, Dano conjured the other all-time performance in arguably we'll argue it here, for argument’s sake) the great movie of the first quarter of the 21st century. Revisit Eli’s opening sermon. Revisit Eli’s baptism of Day-Lewis’s Daniel. Revisit their tussle in the mud. Revisit, of course, their final showdown in the bowling alley. Revisit, too, Dano’s perfect originally planned scene as Paul.)