Age: 42
male
Paul Franklin Dano (born June 19, 1984) is an American actor. He began his career on Broadway before making his film debut in The Newcomers (2000). He won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Debut Performance for his role in L.I.E. (2001) and received accolades for his role as Dwayne Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine (2006). For his dual roles as Paul and Eli Sunday in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007), he was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor. Dano has also received accolades for roles such as John Tibeats in Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013) and Alex Jones in Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners (2013). His acting portrayal of musician Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy (2014) earned him a Golden Globe nomination in the category of Best Supporting Actor. Dano made his directorial debut with the drama film Wildlife (2018), based on the novel by Richard Ford. He co-wrote the screenplay with his partner Zoe Kazan. In 2018, he starred in the Showtime miniseries Escape at Dannemora, for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie. In 2022, he played Edward Nashton / The Riddler in The Batman.
In an interrogation room in an unnamed totalitarian dictatorship, Katurian Katurian, a writer, is being interrogated by two detectives. Next door, Katurian’s mentally disabled brother Michal waits. The detectives want to know why Katurian’s stories feature gruesome plots about child murder and torture, and in particular, why they seem to mirror a string of recent child murders in the area. This brutal dark comedy from Martin McDonagh, the master of the horror-comedy, poses unanswerable questions: Can stories hold the power to cause atrocities? Where is the line between truth and fairy tale? Is a life of horror worth living at all? Drawing on inspiration as diverse as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Kafka, and Antonin Artaud, The Pillowman is a dark, twisty, and utterly unforgettable masterpiece from one of Ireland’s most treasured writers.
