Quentin Tarantino called Paul Dano the worst actor around ― and that’s the polite version.
The “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” writer-director skewered Dano, a Golden Globe and two-time Emmy nominee, in the kind of critique you might mutter to buddies at a bar. But on Bret Easton Ellis’s recent podcast, it came off as unnecessarily harsh.
The insults flew with Tarantino’s ranking of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” a 2007 oil drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Dano, as No. 5 on his best movies list of the 21st century. The “Pulp Fiction” auteur noted (per Deadline), however, that if could have been first or second “if it didn’t have a big, giant flaw in it ... and the flaw is Paul Dano.”
“[Dano] is weak sauce, man. He is the weak sister. [Daniel Day-Lewis] is eating him [alive]. Austin Butler would have been wonderful in that role. [Dano’s] just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy,” Tarantino said, per Variety. “Daniel Day-Lewis shows that he doesn’t need a strong foil. The movie needs it. He doesn’t need anything. It’s supposed to be a two-hander and it’s not! … you put him with the the weakest fucking actor in SAG? The limpest dick in the world?”
Ellis defended Dano’s performance as twins in the film, according to Variety. Tarantino dug in further. “I am not saying he is giving a terrible performance, I am saying he’s giving a non-entity performance … I don’t care for him,” he said.
