Why The 'Hot Neighbor' From Mr. & Mrs. Smith Looks So Familiar
Time is a flat circle and pop culture is nothing more than a snake eating its own tail, so naturally, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" is being rebooted as a television series. Led by Donald Glover and Maya Erskine this time around — the original film memorably starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and reportedly launched their real-life romance — the series about spies asked to pretend that they're a nondescript married couple also features recognizable performers like John Turturro, Michaela Coel ("I Must Destroy You"), Sharon Horgan ("Bad Sisters"), Alexander Skårsgard ("True Blood," "Succession"), Parker Posey ("Best in Show," "Josie and the Pussycats"), Sarah Paulson ("American Horror Story"), and Paul Dano.
So where have audiences seen Dano before? The venerable character actor has been working steadily since he got his start in bit parts on shows like "Smart Guy" and "The Sopranos," and he's been in a number of high-profile movies. So why does the "hot neighbor" from "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" look so familiar? Here are a few of his biggest projects to date — and we had to be pretty choosy, considering that Dano has a truly impressive resumé.
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
There's no question that, even after all these years, one of Paul Dano's best-known roles is as Dwayne in "Little Miss Sunshine." The dark family comedy, released in 2006, stars Abigail Breslin as Olive Hoover, a young girl living in Albuquerque who dreams of becoming a beauty queen. When she gets into the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in California, her family finds a way to get her there with just two days to spare. Alongside Dano and Breslin, the cast is a murderer's row of excellent actors, including Toni Collette, Steve Carell (in his first truly dark role while still working on "The Office"), Greg Kinnear, and the late, great Alan Arkin, who won an Oscar for playing Olive's cantankerous yet big-hearted grandfather Edwin.
Dwayne, for most of the movie, is completely silent; as the family tells Frank (Carell), he's taken a vow of silence until he can achieve his dream of becoming a fighter pilot. Eventually, though, he realizes — with Olive's help — that he's colorblind and can never be a pilot. He's left devastated, speaking for the first time in the film and unleashing his rage and devastation. Dano delivers a carefully considered and quietly heartbreaking performance in the movie, and in the process, establishes himself as a star in the making.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
The year after "Little Miss Sunshine," Paul Dano got the chance to work alongside one of the greatest living actors in Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," where he teamed up with Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis. Originally, Dano was only supposed to play the role of Paul Sunday, a man who tells Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) the location of a valuable oil deposit, but when Kel O'Neill — who was set to play Paul Sunday's brother Eli, a preacher — left the film, Anderson asked Dano to play two roles, and Paul and Eli simply became twins. (O'Neill spoke to Vulture about the situation in 2017 and said it simply didn't work out, and he was eventually removed from the movie's shooting schedule.)
What this ultimately meant for Dano is that he had a much, much bigger role in "There Will Be Blood." As Eli Sunday, he spends more or less the entire movie alongside Daniel Plainview as the preacher agrees to sell his church and its surrounding land to the aspiring oil baron. He's also half of one of the movie's most famous scenes — where Daniel tells Eli, "I drink your milkshake" — though he doesn't survive the film's harrowing final sequence where Day-Lewis' Daniel beats him to death with a bowling pin.
Love & Mercy (2014)
At one point or another, every actor shows up in a biopic — and Paul Dano did just that in 2014's "Love & Mercy." Dano plays a young version of Brian Wilson — founding member of the Beach Boys — while John Cusack plays the troubled musician in the 1980s.
Directed by Bill Pohlad and written by Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner, "Love & Mercy" offers an introspective look at Wilson's difficult life, with Dano playing the musician in the movie's scenes set in the 1960s. In Dano's timeline, Wilson begs his bandmates to take a break from touring and faces immense pressure — but he also works on the band's seminal, beloved album "Pet Sounds," which becomes a massive critical darling. What follows, though, is Wilson's real-life unfinished album "Smile," and working on that drives him into a deep depression ... as does the fact that his father, Murry Wilson (Bill Camp), sells the rights to the Beach Boys' songs without their permission. Dano's part of the movie concludes with Wilson at an extremely low point, and it makes an impact just before Cusack takes over.
The Batman (2022)
Just like biopics, superhero movies seem like a rite of passage for established actors, and Paul Dano also checked that milestone off the list with Matt Reeves' 2022 reboot "The Batman." Alongside Robert Pattinson as the Caped Crusader, Zoë Kravitz as Selina "Catwoman" Kyle, Jeffrey Wright as Commissioner Jim Gordon, and Colin Farrell as Oswald "The Penguin" Cobblepot, Dano plays Edward Nashton, also known as "Batman" villain the Riddler.
Dano plays a particularly slippery version of the Riddler, whose perverse and horrifying clues lead Batman on a chase throughout Gotham. According to an interview in Empire ahead of the film's release, Dano said that while he and Reeves had the Zodiac killer in mind when creating the Riddler's character, he still wanted there to be a heightened element to his performance. "I liked how both grounded and big this film is at the same time," Dano said at the time. "So there are some grounding forces like the Zodiac Killer, right? But it's still 'The Batman,' and for me, it's much bigger, so it was important to let my imagination react to the script, rather than strictly basing it on a serial killer." Dano's performance is as creepy as it is campy, so clearly, this approach worked wonders for the actor.
The Fabelmans (2022)
The same year that he played the Riddler in "The Batman," Paul Dano took on a very different role in "The Fabelmans," Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical film about his family and how he fell in love with filmmaking. Dano plays Burt Fabelman, father to Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) — an aspiring director — and husband to the flighty yet musically talented Mitzi (Michelle Williams), who has some secrets she's hiding from both Burt and Sammy. So how did it feel to play the beloved father of one of Hollywood's very best directors?
"We were blessed with a really beautiful script to build our characters from by Steven and [screenwriter] Tony [Kushner]," Dano told a captive audience during a talkback at the film's Toronto International Film Festival premiere. "And Steven was also very generous about letting us into his life. It was a heavy cloak to bear at times, playing Steven's father, and the spell that we sort of all had going on the sound stages — but a beautiful experience."
Dumb Money (2023)
As of this writing, Paul Dano's most recent high-profile project is 2023's "Dumb Money," directed by Craig Gillespie ("I, Tonya," "Cruella"). Adapted from Ben Mezrich's nonfiction book "The Antisocial Network," the movie focuses on the real-life GameStop situation that dominated the news cycle back in 2021, where Redditors bought stock in the ailing video game store franchise so rapidly that the market price rose to astronomical heights.
Dano plays Keith Gill, a cash-strapped financial analyst who happens to see that GameStop's stock prices are dropping. After putting a ton of money toward purchasing stock in the company, he's perversely rewarded when hedge fund investment companies offload their GameStop stocks and the prices rise sharply. While CEOs and hedge fund managers hemorrhage money, Keith and his gang of finance-minded friends end up making money. Dano stars alongside Pete Davidson, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Sebastian Stan, and Shailene Woodley in this fun, engrossing film. Even those who can barely handle their finances will be entertained by "Dumb Money."