New interview and photoshoot on Dane with actress Julianne Moore. They talk about Dane’s upcoming project: The Staircase and Lisey’s Story on the tragic events that occurred in the final scene. Down below is the article. You can see pictures in our gallery, photo credit to @peytonfulford

Dane DeHaan in Ferragamo at home in Atlanta, GA, June 27, 2021.
Photographer – Peyton Fulford

Dane DeHaan is one of those actors who wheedles his way into your psyche. Working professionally since the day he finished college, Dane is a journeyman performer who can both carry a film as a lead and fold himself into an ensemble cast. And while his piercing blue eyes, lanky frame and husky voice make him instantly recognizable, his ability to immerse himself into a character he is playing also makes him hard to pinpoint — he comes across as familiar, yet inscrutable.

Dane took full advantage of his enigmatic persona for his role as Jim Dooley in the recent Apple TV+ mini-series, “Lisey’s Story,” which is based on the famous Stephen King novel by the same name. In the series, Dane goes toe-to-toe with the Academy Award winning actress, Julianne Moore. And while on set the pair connected over their mutual love for the craft of acting — building up a trust that made even Dane putting a plastic bag over Julianne’s face during filming feel like a safe place. Here, the pair discuss how they both discovered their love of inhabiting roles, what it was like to work on a Stephen King film and how they find humanity even in the most repulsive characters they play.

JULIANNE MOORE. I just saw that you’re doing “The Staircase” with Colin Firth.
DANE DEHAAN. Yeah, it’s a really awesome cast. You know, I haven’t worked since “Lisey’s Storey.” I had the entire year where I was upstate, so this is a good one to get back into the swing of things because it’s an ensemble of great people and I have my family down here. I play Clayton; he’s Michael Peterson’s eldest son, who is played by Colin.

J.M. I think I remember the Michael Peterson story: he murdered his family, but he got away with it. Is that the bigger story?

D.D. I mean, some may take that perspective. His wife died at the bottom of the stairs, then he was put on trial for the murder — he actually ended up going to jail for a while. But to this day, no one really knows what happened. He still says he’s innocent. There’s a theory that an owl might have done it. There were these cuts on the top of her head, but there was no impact to her skull, so no one can figure out where these lacerations came from. And then there were micro feathers that they found on her body, so people are saying that maybe she was attacked by an owl, which actually ends up being maybe the most credible explanation — besides that Michael Peterson did it.

J.M. Let me say that the reason I agreed to do this interview was that I enjoyed working with you so very much on “Lisey’s Story.” I had such a great time with you and you’re so talented; you’re really just extraordinary to be around, I really admired your work and just loved it. I loved being with you and all our crazy scenes. I just think you have a lot of substance and you have so much clarity with what you do — and you’re so precise. I was struck by what a gentle soul you are because we had so many rough things to do. Things were really tough, violent, and strange. I think there are a lot of actors who go there in a way that feels uncomfortable but you managed to do it so fully. You knew exactly who that character was and what he was doing. But you also brought a delicacy to it as a human being. I admire that because I think that’s something that only the best actors do.

D.D. Thanks! We had such a great time, right? One thing that I loved about you was the tone you set while filming, which was a loving, caring and a fun environment. Although, like you said, we were doing these terrible things. But it always struck me, even when we were doing our most intense scenes, that as soon as they called “cut,” you would be the first to smile and laugh. You have this ability to go to these deep, dark places, but then quickly transition back into what is truly a healthy work environment, which I think is so important. And oftentimes, like you said, is not the case, I think at the end of the day, it ends up feeling more like a job I can do forever versus something that will end up being devastating to my soul.

J.M. It’s funny because people always say to me that a lot of stuff that I’ve done has been dark and they will ask, “Well, how do you do that?” or “Oh my God, you’re so brave.” But I’m like, “We’re just pretending?” You know? It’s like you’re given a container of make-believe, right? Your body and feelings are in this container, but your intellect is outside of it. So, as long as you have that, you have the ability to really explore it. You can go as far and as hard as you want, safely.

D.D. I had this acting teacher who used to tell me to be the bad boy on stage and the good guy in the classroom, which I thought was cool because a lot of what I do feels like it almost gives me permission to misbehave, which is fun. Like you said, you want to do it safely, and you want to have fun doing it. When they say “action,” it allows you to go to a place and no one wants you to be that when they say “cut.”

J.M. We love movies, music, books, travel and parties because as human beings, we want to go somewhere where we feel things that are heightened and extreme. So for us, to be able to have that in our work is thrilling. That’s what I saw you doing time and time again, and I loved it. You said you met your wife when you were at a summer theater program, right?
D.D. I went to the North Carolina School of the Arts and they have a high school program, so you can go your senior year of high school. We went there together for our senior year of high school and then four years of college, where we started dating. Well, we did it for one month in high school, then I broke up with her. And then she got a really serious boyfriend and I got super jealous. I think we started dating again during our second year of college and we’ve been together ever since. We’re about to have our nine year anniversary.

J.M. So did you start acting in high school then?
D.D. Yeah, I mean I did community theater stuff growing up. It was definitely what I always wanted to do, so it was a lot of musicals and that kind of stuff growing up in Pennsylvania because that’s just what was available to me. Then it got serious in terms of learning how to act in my senior year of high school.

J.M. I didn’t really understand that you can be an actor because I didn’t know anybody. I only knew movies and high school plays — stuff like that. But I didn’t know anyone professional; I didn’t know there was a path to that.
D.D. Did you go to school?

J.M. Yeah, I went to college. I started acting in an after-school thing when I was in junior high and in high school. That was the one thing that I felt like I could do because I didn’t make the cheerleading team, and I didn’t do all that other stuff. It wasn’t until I had a teacher, my junior year of high school, who told me you can do this for a living. She gave me a copy of a Dramatics Magazine and I looked at the colleges in there and thought, “Well, I’ll apply.” But when I got to college, there were all these kids who’ve done these programs. They already knew about the professional path but I didn’t know about that until that teacher told me.

D.D. I knew that I wanted to do it, but I definitely never dreamed I would be making movies or shows with people like you. I’ve always imagined myself as a starving artist, as in doing regional theater every once in a while. I feel like they kind of set us up to not be that successful because that is the reality for most people that try to do it, so a lot of the focus — in terms of getting out of school — is what you can do to pay your bills. This is how you can get by and this is how to seek out work for yourself. However, it was something I always wanted to do, but I didn’t want to try to do as a kid professionally because I just loved doing it so much — that’s why I did it. Then it got real, and I just loved it because I loved acting and I always wanted to learn how to do it. I wanted to go to school for it and I wanted to go to a conservatory because it was always really important to me to really learn it, in a classical training kind of way.

J.M. That’s very evident in your work. I’ve worked with lots and lots of people, but you can always tell when someone’s trained just because of the way they can adapt to improv precisely.
D.D. For “Lisey’s Story,” the way that Pablo [Larraín] had me work on everything felt like — for the first time since I’ve left school — that I was doing this mask kind of thing because I would show up on set and they would put me in so much makeup to make me look just awful. A lot of the days with my explorations with Pablo, he would put me in a space and give me things to play with and explore. So much of my work feels like it’s from the inside out but there was a lot about this that I felt from the outside in; from the eating to the yo-yo, or even just looking at the mirror at myself in this costume and makeup, and letting it inform me who Dooley was, you know? It’s one of the things that I really loved about Pablo, his openness to go there. It didn’t always feel like we were going after any kind of a result. A lot of the time, I didn’t really understand what the result was going to be.

J.M. He loved you so much because I remember from the very beginning when we were shooting [first], and then you started shooting [after]. I came back the next day and he told me, “Julie, Dane is so good. Oh, he’s so good. He’s doing these amazing things.” He was so excited by this actor who could do anything. I remember you at the very beginning of our first read-through and I was like, “Oh shoot, this guy, he’s got it down. He’s figured this out. Like, this is already here. It’s so good.” Did you start working right out of school?
D.D. Yeah, I did. When I got out of school, I looked like I was 16 years old, so I had this advantage of being classically trained but looking like I was a teenager — I did all this stuff where I played teenagers. Also, I did a lot of theater and a lot of Off Broadway stuff. Then I did season three of “In Treatment,” which was such a good showcase for any actor, especially as a young actor. That kind of launched me into movies. Now, I think because of the nature of the business, I’ve only done these limited series for the past three to five years. Did you start working right out of school?

J.M. Yeah, I did. I was in New York and I was there for about six months before I started getting jobs in regional theatre, so I did my first job in the Buffalo Studio Arena, in Buffalo, New York. Then, I went back to Boston University, after which I came back to New York and I got a short stint on the soap opera. Then, I ended up going on another soap opera while doing Off Broadway theater the whole time that I was on the show and then got out of it, then did some other television, then an independent film happened — that’s really when my career changed.
D.D. The one thing that I watched during “Lisey’s Story,” I had never seen of yours [before], was “Vanya on 42nd Street,” which I thought was so cool.

J.M. A couple of girlfriends of mine told me they were meeting André Gregory for this workshop production of “Uncle Vanya” that he was doing and I didn’t have a meeting. I was doing this play called “Ice Cream and Hot Fudge ” at the Public Theater, and sharing dressing rooms with an experimental theater group. Jack [Doulin] was the person who was casting this thing for André. So I ran into him and said, “My girlfriend said she has a meeting with André Gregory.” I’m like, “I don’t have a meeting with him, can you get me on this?” And he was like, “Well, I don’t think you’re right for this. Because you’re kind of in between. You’re not Yelena, and you’re not Sonya.”

I just wanted to meet him; I was 27. So I met with André and had a long conversation. At the end of the meeting, he asked me what I was doing this next summer and I told him that I felt like I should probably go to L.A. to try and make some money or try to find something commercial. He asked me to stay and to do this workshop with him — he cast me as Yelena. That was a five year workshop process. So, in between a lot of the things that I was doing, we would always come back and rehearse this workshop and eventually just started performing it for small groups of people. Then, five years later, we made it into a film. But it completely changed my feelings about work with things being process-oriented rather than result-oriented. We were in rehearsal, we never locked it until we filmed it, which meant that whatever an actor is doing to you, you had to react. You reacted authentically to what that actor was saying rather than reacting the way you would, if you had to kick me in the back for being in a certain place. That meant that certain relationships ended up being very, very strong while others didn’t work out because the actors didn’t find that path the same.

Wallace Shawn and I got very, very close. That relationship of Yelena and Vanya, which is where he’s in love with her and she couldn’t care less about him, actually became a wonderful and a soulmate kind of relationship, meaning that both the tragedy and Vanya ended up being bigger. It completely changed everything about the way I looked at acting. It started when I was 27 and it ended when I was 32, so my whole life changed. It was really fascinating. It was one of the most profound experiences of my development.

D.D. I can tell that when I was watching it and I didn’t know the journey prior to that. But watching it, I can see you being very open and receptive. And like you said, it’s about listening to what the person is saying and just reacting naturally off of that. It was really amazing work and it made me even more excited to work with you.

J.M. Because we’re working on Stephen King, did you find that it was different from other projects, as he is so well known and iconic?
D.D. I felt like what made it different was Pablo, and the environment that he created. I also thought it was amazing how available he made himself to us and how willing he was, especially for my character, to continue to change it. I was very surprised — I think it’s a sign of his genius that he wasn’t precious about it. He wanted to continue to make it better and continue to change it.

J.M. I was impressed by that too, I really was… — and his delight in the whole creative process; I love that he was a part of it. We were able to use him as a resource and that he was such an amazing cheerleader for all of us too. Are there any particular kinds of parts that you’re drawn to as an artist? Are there any genres that you prefer?

D.D. I don’t know. I feel like I’ve done a lot of different genres. It’s not always necessarily the stuff that I’m going to watch when I go to the theater or when I sit down on my couch. I do what I do because I love acting, but the roles that are the most different from me, [are the ones] I find interesting; can I figure out what makes this person tick, what drives this person forward, where are they coming from to make these decisions? That’s the most exciting part of the job — creating the character. Ultimately, I want everything to be as believable and real as possible. It’s more challenging if I try to do that as someone who’s not like myself.

J.M. Where did you start with Dooley? How did you start with that character?

D.D. Well, it started with the conversations [I had] with Pablo and him talking about the eating. I’m a big believer that you can tell who someone is by what they do. Pablo had all these incredible ideas about what Dooley was going to be doing that were in the script and those were constantly either eating or playing with the yo-yo — just doing things very slowly. I was trying to understand all these things that Dooley does, and how that lines up with the things he has to do in the shop. I just remember walking around thinking, “Can I eat it? Should I kill it?” I think those are the two main thoughts that I felt Dooley always had. I think things have to make sense to me in life and in my work. If it’s just somebody doing crazy things and you’re just doing crazy things — that doesn’t make any sense. There’s a reason why they’re doing the things Dooley did.

J.M. In “Lisey’s Story,” I probably did one of the scariest things I’ve ever had to do as an actor, which was to have a plastic bag over my head.
D.D. Oh my gosh, I know. That’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done — putting a plastic bag over your head!

J.M. But honestly, I felt so relaxed with you. It’s really hard to do but you managed to put it over with a lot of control. You did that thing where it looks forceful and you had to be really clean with it but it was so soft. For me, there was no sensation on my neck. It ended up being so much fun.
D.D. We have a lot of fighting moments, and even with Joan [Allen] and Jennifer [Jason Leigh] — fighting with all of you. I really did not want to hurt anybody. I was fighting with icons! I didn’t want to hurt anybody or set anyone’s career back.

J.M. It was so exciting and so scary. You made it so easy, I didn’t have to do anything. I don’t know how you did it.

Source: ODDA Magazine