When you perform without a net, it’s good to trust your co-workers.
Take Paul Dano. His incarnation of the young preacher Eli Sunday in “There Will Be Blood,” opening today at the Mayan, is a risky exploration of the place where spirituality meets messianic ambition.
As the pastor of the fledgling Church of the Third Revelation, Sunday has the air of a manchild chosen by God and patient because of it. When he casts out a demon, he begins with a confident whisper in the ear of an old woman before working himself into a crescendo and showing Satan the door.
Sunday meets his match in megalomaniacal vision in Daniel Plainview, an oilman who comes to the arid California terrain in the early 1900s to lease the land under which a sea of oil roils.
Daniel Day-Lewis is Plainview, a man so shrewd he appears to understand everything about himself except how to be content. He’s been described in a few reviews as a sociopath. That’s not far off.
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has cast a number of his films (there are five features) with a clarity that seemed only his. Day-Lewis is hardly an example of that. But Adam Sandler in “Punch-Drunk Love,” Mark Wahlberg in “Boogie Nights,” even Tom Cruise in “Magnolia” are. He knew they had something different in them and proved it to audiences.
“Paul has so much control over what’s happening in his frame. He’s so precise and detail-oriented, so he’s able to give the actors the freedom within that frame because everything else he’s in control of all the elements so well,” says Dano by phone.
“With Daniel — God, there’s no better person to work with. He’s not someone you can figure out how they work. The performances that really move me are when you see something and you don’t know how that person did it, how they arrived at that point. That’s what really gets me off. He’s one of those actors who’s always able to do that for me.”
Dano first worked with the British-born actor in “The Ballad of Jack and Rose,” directed by Rebecca Miller, Day- Lewis’ wife.
In 2006, the 23-year-old Dano contributed mightily to the ace ensemble film “Little Miss Sunshine.” He was the one with the perpetual teen scowl, who harbored a desire to be a pilot and would communicate only by writing on a notepad. When crushing news comes that he can’t be a pilot, his reaction is a true crash and burn.
Dano’s face can have a disturbing calm to it. His eyes provide the commentary. His body does much of the rest. Since his debut in the indie “L.I.E.,” he’s conveyed the intelligence and, sometimes, the resentment that simmer behind the adolescent mask.
When Plainview betrays an understanding they have that Sunday will bless the first Little Boston well, Dano’s eyes register the humiliation, though he stands ramrod still in a crowd.
To get to the core of Sunday, Dano read up on California during the early 20th century, and he did some research on evangelical preachers.
“But, there’s one great thing about Eli,” he says. “He didn’t have radio or television, or Internet or money. I really think he made himself up. I think he might have seen a preacher who’d come through or lived in a neighboring town. But he’s a bit of an actor. He created this persona once he saw what religion could do for him. He’s savvy and charismatic enough to take advantage of that and let it manifest itself in him.
“I really think he created this persona. So as an actor that’s a privilege.”
A few days earlier, Dano ended a run of “Things We Want,” Jonathan Marc Sherman’s play about three brothers living in the apartment of their parents who committed suicide. As dark as that sounds, the actor found a refuge from the hullabaloo of moviedom in the play, directed by Ethan Hawke.
“I grew up doing theater, and I haven’t done a play in years,” said Dano, who was raised in Wilton, Conn.
“It was an off-Broadway play and a nonprofit theater. There’s a spirit to it that’s really great and grounding, and reminds you why you do what you do,” he says.
