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Roll up, roll up: who will be the first to ask Paul Dano what he makes of Quentin Tarantino’s acting abilities, after the director’s bananas tirade against Dano (plus Owen Wilson and Matthew Lillard) on a podcast last year. Tarantino called Dano “weak sauce”, especially for his role opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, leading to a pile-on of outraged praise for the actor from the likes of George Clooney, Toni Collette, Ben Stiller, Day-Lewis himself – and multiple articles in this paper.
We also feel he’s superb as Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy; chilling in 12 Years a Slave; and unforgettable in Prisoners – particularly the scene where Hugh Jackman keeps him alive inside a wall.
That likable yet quietly unnerving quality has been there from the start. After an astonishing early role opposite Brian Cox in L.I.E, his breakthrough came in Little Miss Sunshine as Dwayne, a teenager who takes a vow of silence until he achieves his dream of becoming a fighter pilot. More recently, his low-key take on the Riddler in The Batman was a standout – all the more unsettling for how far it veered from Jim Carrey’s Lycra-clad turn in Batman Forever and Frank Gorshin’s camp baddy in the 60s TV series and into a DIY, army surplus-clad villain of his very own.
We’re also big fans of his 2018 directorial debut, Wildlife, as well as his farting corpse film, Swiss Army Man, with Daniel Radcliffe, and his turn as Steven Spielberg’s father in The Fabelmans.
Now Dano returns in political thriller The Wizard of the Kremlin, as a young artist in 90s Russia who morphs into an influential government official and spin doctor at the heart of the government, while a young Vladimir Putin played by Jude Law, who – according to one Guardian opinion at least – acts like a Russian James Bond.
Spin doctors, presidents, jokers and everyone in between is invited to post questions for Dano, when he sits for the next Guardian reader interview. Please get in your questions by 6pm GMT on 2 April, and we’ll print his answers shortly afterwards.
The Wizard of the Kremlin is in UK and Irish cinemas from 17 April
