Quentin Tarantino Started A Film Twitter Riot: Is Paul Dano “Weak Sauce”?

Perhaps the surest sign that Quentin Tarantino intends to make due on his promise to retire after making one more movie is the fact that he feels comfortable going on a podcast and talking trash about an actor. On The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, Tarantino recently set the internet ablaze by unveiling an impromptu list of his favorite movies of the 21st century so far. However, his love of There Will Be Blood, which makes his top five (kinda normie-film-bro, there, QT! Wouldn’t the bolder Paul Thomas Anderson choice be Licorice Pizza or Inherent Vice?) is affixed with an asterisk. A very punchable asterisk, apparently. There Will Be Blood could have made a play for the number one spot “if it didn’t have a big giant flaw in it, and the flaw is Paul Dano,” Tarantino said.

He continued: “He is weak sauce, man. He’s a weak sister,” noting that “Austin Butler would have been wonderful in that role” and and Dano is “just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy.” After calling him “the weakest male actor in SAG,” Tarantino went on to say that “I don’t care for him, I don’t care for Owen Wilson, and I don’t care for Matthew Lillard.” He then went on to acclaim as the best movie of the century Black Hawk Down, which features powerhouses like Orlando Bloom, Ioan Gruffudd, and Jeremy Piven. (To be fair, it also has Ewan McGregor, Josh Hartnett, William Fichtner, and Eric Bana; it’s just hard to notice because the movie renders most of its performers entirely interchangeable.)

This is clearly just Tarantino excitedly gabbing about his opinions to a bozo pal, as is his wont, and clearly feeling secure enough in his power (and/or serious enough about his backward ambition to transition to film criticism from directing) to say some impolitic stuff about another artist (and fellow thespian! Don’t forget Tarantino has studied the craft, sometimes under tutelage of the director Also Quentin Tarantino). But it does tap into an instinctive dislike that Dano seems capable of prompting in some people – something that Paul Thomas Anderson was arguably using in There Will Be Blood by casting Dano as Eli Sunday, the preacher nemesis of oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis).

Dano was actually originally cast in a smaller role as Eli’s brother Paul, with those brothers converted into twins when Anderson let the original Eli actor go, early in the shoot. Eli Sunday doesn’t look or sound like a man who’s going to properly square off with the volcanic, misanthropic Plainview. Yet their paths keep crossing, and Sunday is an unceasing source of vexation for Plainview. There’s something formidable in that; if Dano was as much of an actual or unintentional “nonentity” as Tarantino claims, the movie wouldn’t work as well as it does.

Still, I’m sympathetic to Tarantino’s aversion to Dano, because I’ve felt it myself. At times, he’s bravely courted it, leaning into the misfit status of his (generally more likable) teenage Little Miss Sunshine character in movies like Cowboys & Aliens, Prisoners, Looper, and The Batman, where he plays a variety of screw-ups, sniveling weirdos, and murder suspects. This energy has unfortunately bled into some of his less character-actor parts; he’s the lead in the meta-rom-com Ruby Sparks, and while his character is intended to be secretly toxic, Dano and the screenplay (by his partner Zoe Kazan!) telegraph those qualities with a fussy, demonstrative obviousness that smothers the movie’s sense of discovery. His “real” character winds up feeling like more of an affected, writerly construction than the Manic Pixie Dream Girl who magically springs to life from his writing. Even a leading role that seems tailor-made for Dano winds up an awkward fit.

But Dano can also be tremendously effective in a similar mode, as in Love & Mercy, where he plays a troubled Brian Wilson; his tremulous fragility matches Wilson’s sensibility in a way that a more traditionally assertive or charm-bombing performer would not. Moreover, Dano hasn’t exactly been overexposed in recent years, instead popping up for crucial parts in several ensembles. Was he ill-cast as a Very Online version of the Riddler in The Batman? Not at all! He was so into it that he proved his nerd bona fides by writing a six-issue prequel comic miniseries about his character! Was someone cool supposed to play Burt Fabelman in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans? No! Didn’t Dano work perfectly well as an affably dorky amateur finance nerd in Dumb Money? Absolutely!

Of course, you can’t argue someone out of an instinctive dislike of an actor, and Tarantino’s citations of Wilson and Lillard should provide ample evidence that he’s talking about personal taste more than sober assessment of ability. But director-writer-actor Tarantino also seems oddly oblivious to Dano’s career as a filmmaker; Wildlife, which he co-wrote with Kazan and directed without appearing in it, is an incisive family drama with Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllanhaal, and made it into the Criterion Collection.

None of this is to say that Paul Dano needs my or anyone’s defense. He has a family with Zoe Kazan, he makes his living as an actor, and he seems like a creative, secure guy. He wrote some Batman comics for fun! Hey, wait a minute: Writing, directing, and acting… likes comics… frequently cast as intentionally off-putting characters… accused of saucelessness… who should understand this guy better than Quentin Tarantino? Maybe every accusation really is a confession.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.