After breakout roles in Chronicle and The Place Beyond The Pines, the actor is having a good year. And in 2014, there's The Amazing Spider-Man 2...
"I've heard someone say that when people get famous, the qualities they had already just get magnified," says Dane DeHaan over an afternoon glass of red wine. "If they were an asshole before then maybe they'll be a huge asshole. But if they were a well-intentioned, grounded person then they'll become an even better intentioned, even more grounded person. Hopefully."
At this point, he laughs. Either way, this affable 27-year-old is about to find out. Already one of the most talked-about young actors in Hollywood, after breakout roles in Chronicle and The Place Beyond The Pines, DeHaan is about to take it up another notch or three. There's Metallica concert movie/sensory overload, Metallica: Through The Never, in which DeHaan gets his own little film within a film. Then there's Beat poet biopic Kill Your Darlings, in which he steals the show from Daniel Radcliffe. After that it's on to The Amazing Spider-Man sequel to play 'best friend' Harry Osborn (a role occupied in previous versions by one James Franco). Finally he joins up with director Anton Corbijn to make a biopic of the life of James Dean. DeHaan will be playing Dean.
He may not have quite the same celestial bone structure as the original Rebel Without A Cause (though "a lot of people say I look like David Bowie"), but DeHaan is capable of generating the same on-screen intensity. His deep-set eyes radiate a toughness that belies his skinny frame. He can storm around like an emotional hurricane on the verge of gobbling up everything around it. This was the case in Chronicle and …Pines, but also, bizarrely, in Metallica: Through The Never. The main action is centred around the band's ginormous live show, which a troupe of intrepid cameramen attempt to capture for 3D posterity (devil's horns have never looked bigger, or more likely to poke your eye out). DeHaan, meanwhile, plays a mute young roadie called Trip who wanders across an increasingly apocalyptic cityscape on a secret mission for the band. He gets smacked around, he gets smashed into, but he barely emits a groan, staring down all bad guys and confronting gangs by dousing himself in petrol, hoody up, lighter in hand.
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"Well, erm, I honestly wasn't that huge a fan," says DeHaan, with an embarrassed chuckle, of his relationship with the band. "Certainly in my childhood they were kind of a looming presence, but if I wanted a CD at the time my parents would, like, screen it. So I would say, 'I want Metallica, Master Of Puppets,' and they would buy a copy, listen to it and go, 'No you can't have that.'" He says he only ever listened to the band seriously after he had begun to prepare for his role in …Pines, where he played the troubled son of a legendary bank robber. "I was just trying to get into his headspace," he says. "And I thought: 'My character would listen to Metallica.'"
Getting into a headspace is something that DeHaan obviously places great value on." To prepare for a role, I'll take as much time as I'm given," he says. "If I'm given six months, I'll take six months, gladly." It's what he's always enjoyed about acting. "I love the work part of it. Developing the character, digging deeper and trying to create a fully fleshed-out individual distinct from myself; that's what's fun about it."
DeHaan grew up in a "standard" household in a town in Pennsylvania called Zionsville, the son of a computer programmer and a furniture company executive. The way he tells it, he made his mind up about acting at the age of four and hasn't looked back. "The place I went to for church had a pamphlet for a feeder camp," he says. "So I started going there." He made his stage debut aged five, in a limited run of Aesop's Fables at the Asbury United Methodist Church. By the time he reached high school, he was "pretty much sleeping through classes, going to rehearse for the school play until six o'clock and then leaving, throwing down some fast food real quick, and rehearsing for the community theatre."
If that wasn't enough, at the same time he was also catching the bus down to New York to take in even more theatrical instruction. "I would go to readings for Philip Seymour Hoffman's company," he says. "Along with Al Pacino, he's my favourite living actor; he seems to do this for all the right reasons. I've seen him in a couple of plays and he rarely has a false moment. If someone doesn't have a false moment then I'm not thinking about the fact that they're acting; those are the kind of performances that really leave an impression."
That pretty much serves as an accurate description of DeHaan's performance as Lucien Carr in Kill Your Darlings. An origin myth for the Beat generation, the film tells the story of the relationship between Carr and Allen Ginsberg (slim, toned and played by the aforementioned Radcliffe). Carr is a whirlpool of charisma, sucking the relatively callow Ginsberg into murky waters. He's played by DeHaan with a glint that at first suggests an eccentric enthusiast, a Doc Brown, but then reveals something both darker and more vulnerable. Tied together, these strands bring the fevered creativity of the Beats to life.
"The Beats were about artistic self-expression. These were people who couldn't behave in the way they wanted to and it was all about finding a way to express themselves. They wanted to find their true voice and this movie is about that process. It's very different from today. Now, many people have an ideal first world situation in that they can live how they want. Ultimately it becomes easy to ignore the problems of the world and become obsessed with yourself. That said, today people are obsessed with the Beats, perhaps more than ever."
DeHaan says that this may be because the Beats were the original hipsters. He lives in the hipster capital of Brooklyn so should know, but he talks without a scintilla of snarkiness about his neighbourhood. "I think some people live there and still have some kind of stigma about it," DeHaan says. "But I don't see what's so wrong with living in one of the hippest, coolest places in the world."
Married in the past year to Chronicle co-star Anna Wood, he's happy in his domestic life (they have a dog, they listen to Muse and Macklemore, he plays golf). He's also enjoyed his experience on the Spider-Man movie, which will be expected to break box-office records on its release next year. He won't give much away about his character, but he does say, "I got to do some crazy shit. [Director] Marc Webb makes you think you're in a little indie [film] with your friends because he's just so chilled. He's not screaming and throwing things. He takes as much pressure off of it as possible, but I guess the sets are so fucking cool that you step into the middle of that and you're like, 'OK, this is amazing.'"
In person DeHaan seems thoroughly, perhaps even overly, well-adjusted. In a movie he can conjure up bursts of emotional energy that feel true, to the extent that you suspect he must have dredged them up from some damaged past. Not so, says he. "I think everyone is born with the ability to do that," he explains. "But when you grow older sometimes imagination is the first thing to go. It's no longer cool to be like that and people feel they have to conform to what they think they should be doing. But I think you can keep the imagination alive. Because I was so obsessed with doing this my whole life, I think I've done that."
Metallica: Through The Never is out 15 Oct; Kill Your Darlings on 6 Dec
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/27/dane-dehaan-metallica-through-the-never
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