Paul Dano can apparently be incredibly meticulous when it comes to his craft.
In a Hollywood Reporter profile of the 37-year-old actor, published Wednesday, The Batman director Matt Reeves claimed Dano took around 200 takes to get one specific scene just right, per the outlet
Dano and Reeves sat in opposite rooms as the actor performed a scene in which his character, the Riddler, speaks to Batman, played by Robert Pattinson, through a cellphone video. Reeves said Dano requested they reshoot the sequence multiple times, “directing this one-person play on an iPhone.”
According to the director, Dano was “very critical of himself” and took his role as the Riddler incredibly seriously. Dano’s Riddler is shrouded in an Army combat mask the vast majority of the film, and Dano mentioned that when he set it on for the first time, he felt a feeling of “power, mainly because you don’t want the individual sporting that masks going for walks toward you. And for someone [like The Riddler] who felt powerless in their daily life, that is a huge emotion to be given.”
Dano mentioned he was obsessive around minimal specifics that could be inserted into the character, together with attempting on hundreds of pairs of glasses just before he selected the easy, obvious plastic frames The Riddler retains on above his mask.
“I’m not the guy who’s like, ‘If you don’t see my toes in the shot, I’m likely to place on far more comfortable shoes,’” Dano explained. “That’s just not how it is effective.”
The film sees The Riddler main Batman down a sordid Gotham rabbit gap with elaborate thoughts games and the cheeky, cryptic clues and dispatches common to the comic ebook character.
“This is a male who survived by obtaining a way to emphasis his brain on something apart from his own feelings and trauma and suffering,” Dano explained, adding that a monumental component of his backstory was “the thought that puzzles have been the only area that he would be given any type of favorable feed-back in his lifetime. They ended up the only point that ever stated to him in his full existence, ‘You gain.’”
“The Batman” opens March 4 in theaters.
