10. The King (2005)

This disquieting narrative debut from the British director James Marsh (The Theory of Everything) is a kind of minor Cape Fear. Gael García Bernal plays a sociopathic outsider threatening the apparently perfect life of his long-lost preacher father (William Hurt). In what now looks like a dry run for There Will Be Blood, Dano is the earnest son campaigning for creationism to be taught at school, and sideswiped by the emergence of his sinister half-brother. Variety labelled the film “noxious”. It’s undoubtedly nasty, but Dano helps to lend it a pulse.

9. Swiss Army Man (2016)

Superficially macabre, this buddy-movie with Dano as the stranded shipwreck survivor and Daniel Radcliffe as the corpse who washes ashore is surprisingly touching. Sure, it is full of the sort of manufactured eccentricity that would reach fever pitch in the same directors’ next film, Everything Everywhere All at Once. But even as Dano is using Radcliffe’s body as a water dispenser, a hunting weapon and a fart-powered raft, a palpable tenderness emerges. They make a lovely couple.

8. The Fabelmans (2022)

For a measure of Dano’s versatility, try this: in the space of a few months, he played the placid engineer Burt Fabelman, workaholic dad to the budding film-maker hero of Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical saga (and loosely based on the director’s own father, Arnold), and menaced Gotham City as the Riddler in The Batman. Dano nails Burt’s hushed, gulping melancholy as he watches his unfaithful wife (Michelle Williams) and ambitious son (Gabriel LaBelle) slip free of his influence.

7. Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

A likable road movie about an Albuquerque family driving cross-country in a yellow VW van so that the youngest child (Abigail Breslin) can compete in a beauty pageant. It smacks now of a certain Sundance 00s indie preciousness but the cast, including Alan Arkin (who won an Oscar for playing the disreputable grandfather), is a treat. Dano is poignant and funny as the emo teen who communicates solely in scribbled notes (eg “I hate everyone”) until a crisis draws from him an anguished Munchian scream. Few actors could make the mission-statement dialogue that follows – “Fuck beauty contests! Life is one fucking beauty contest after another!” – sound so sincere.

6. For Ellen (2012)

Comedian and actor Kate McKinnon described Dano in 2016 as a “hunky sad-eyed sex machine” but that quality has rarely been exploited straightforwardly on screen. One exception is this wrenching study of a deadbeat-dad rock musician who grabs a last chance to connect with his daughter. “It came alive because of Paul,” said the film’s director, So Yong Kim. “He developed so many details. The outfits, the rings, fingernails, hair, the way he walked and carried himself. He transformed completely.”

5. The Batman (2022)

As the masked, panting, clingfilm-wrapped Riddler, AKA Edward Nashton, Dano is terrifying even when he isn’t dispatching his victims with hammers and bombs. He even seems to give Robert Pattinson’s Batman the heebie-jeebies. Best of all is the moment near the end of Matt Reeves’s increasingly baggy superhero reboot when Dano is at last seen without his mask, and the suspense tightens all at once. Apprehended by cops in a diner, he is presented with an array of different IDs, each one bearing his face. “Which one’s you?” asks the arresting officer. “You tell me,” he replies coolly. Spoken like a true character actor.

4. L.I.E. (2001)

Dano had amassed plenty of childhood acting experience – aged 12, he was already sharing a Broadway stage with George C Scott – but his special gift for flayed vulnerability was first apparent to cinema audiences in this unsettling indie drama. In only his second screen role, he plays a neglected teenager who falls into the orbit of a sex offender (Brian Cox). Still shocking is the moment when Cox tenderly shaves Dano’s cherubic face with a cut-throat razor. “My first thought now is: how did we do that?” Dano said in 2023, before confirming that Cox, with whom he was reunited in the odd-couple comedy-drama The Good Heart and on television in the BBC’s War and Peace, “was lovely to me”.

3. Ruby Sparks (2012)

Marketed as a romcom, this is far stickier and more complex than that label would suggest: one wag described it as Annie Hall meets Frankenstein. Back in the care of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the husband-and-wife directing team behind Little Miss Sunshine, Dano plays a blocked novelist whose creative juices start flowing again after he invents an idealised female character, Ruby (played by Dano’s partner, Zoe Kazan, who is also the film’s screenwriter). Once she springs to life, he discovers he can modify and control her characteristics merely by setting them down on paper, which leads to an acutely disturbing climax. Dano is adept at compartmentalising the sweet (Swiss Army Man) and the unsavoury (Prisoners), but it’s fascinating to see them mixed together here on the same palette.

2. There Will Be Blood (2007)

When Paul Thomas Anderson sacked Kel O’Neill, the actor initially cast as the snivelling, sanctimonious preacher Eli Sunday, Dano was promoted to the role with only a few days’ notice. (He also kept his original part, the smaller role of Eli’s brother Paul.) The result is electrifying: Eli may writhe and wriggle as he casts the demons out of his congregation, but it’s Dano who feels like a man possessed. In accusing him of giving “a non-entity performance”, Quentin Tarantino misunderstands the dynamic between the ogre-like oil prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and the irksome Eli, who threatens his stranglehold. The Pulp Fiction director craves an equally weighted standoff. But the oil titan is rattled and exasperated precisely because this apparently puny adversary gets under his skin. He can’t fathom the boy: he’s not a business rival, like the prim suits Plainview taunts in the restaurant scene, and he isn’t a cheat, like the man posing as Plainview’s brother. Those dopes are run-of-the-mill. (Plainview insults the former and wastes no time killing the latter.) Eli, though, is a uniquely stubborn irritant. To put another alpha-male type opposite Day-Lewis would have rendered the battle conventional. That’s one thing Dano couldn’t be if he tried.

1. Love & Mercy (2014)

This fractured Brian Wilson biopic ping-pongs between the 1960s (LSD, Pet Sounds, the first massing of clamorous voices in Wilson’s head) and the 1980s (when the genius Beach Boy was drugged and dominated by an exploitative doctor, played by Paul Giamatti in skin-crawling mode). A bold concept demands bold actors, and this film has them: John Cusack is suitably dazed and wary as the older Wilson, while Dano has the more demanding task in encapsulating the musician’s fizzing highs and plunging lows, as well as all the shades of trauma in between. From Wilson’s perfectionism in the studio, conducting a chorus of barking dogs or abandoning an expensive recording session because of bad vibrations, to his hounded timidity in the presence of his abusive father (Bill Camp), this is a layered and mighty performance – Dano’s best on film, in fact, equalled only by his portrayal of a convict having an affair with a prison employee in Ben Stiller’s 2018 mini-series Escape at Dannemora. Judging from Tarantino’s macho playground taunts (he calls Dano “weak sauce” and “a weak sister”), his beef seems to hinge on a perceived deficit of red meat in the milky-faced actor. A few minutes of Love & Mercy are all it takes to render that charge at best ill-informed, at worst moronic. As Anthony Lane attested in his rave New Yorker review: “There is nothing wimpish in [Dano’s] fine depiction of Wilson.”