We’ll soon be seeing Paul Dano starring in cutesy romance Ruby Sparks (co-starring alongside his own real life lady love, Zoe Kazan, who also penned the screenplay), but as wonderful as a sweet Dano is, there’s something much better: a cruel Dano. While a lot of the praise for P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood went (quite deservedly) to Daniel Day-Lewis for his yowling, evil performance as Daniel Plainview, Dano was just as terrifying (and just as unhinged) as Eli Sunday. Something about seeing Dano’s generally welcoming face twisted up into snarls and howls and screams was viciously unsettling, and it’s been too long since we’ve seen that side of him.
Deadline Franklin reports that’s no longer the case, as we’ll soon be gifted with a particularly cruel Dano in Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years A Slave, where he will play a slave owner who “brutalizes” Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character, a free man who is abducted into the Louisiana slave trade. Dano will, in fact, just be one of the evil owners, but his performance will likely be a stand-out. He and Ejiofor will also be joined in the film by McQueen’s consistent star, Michael Fassbender, along with Brad Pitt.