Dane DeHaan Is Happy to Be the Bad Guy (Again)
Say you’re a cocaine broker—nominally, your family runs a shipping company, but the thing that really keeps the business afloat is connecting prospective buyers of multi-ton drug shipments with eager sellers, and moving the freight from one to the other. Say one of those buyers attempts to scuttle the shipment, instructing the captain to abandon ship and leave you for dead. Say you singlehandedly manage to make it to port in Senegal. Congratulations: you’re left with the challenge of moving $60 million worth of illicit cargo through a jihadist-controlled stretch of the Sahara, and then to its destination in Italy. Bummer, right?
This is the logistical nightmare faced by Chris and Emma Lynwood, the brokers at the heart of ZeroZeroZero, the sprawling, distressingly grim eight-part epic now streaming on Amazon. Dane DeHaan, who plays Chris, currently finds himself facing a slightly less complicated—though no less serious—problem while self-isolating with his wife and young daughter in upstate New York. “Right now, we are turning our guest room in this house into a room for our baby boy that's coming in June,” he tells me over a Zoom video call that, while a little fritzy, nonetheless picks up his startling baritone. “I didn't realize that once you start taking stuff out of one room, you have to move around basically your entire house.” He takes a beat and lays the sarcasm on a little thicker: “So that's been one thing during this whole pandemic that's been a huge logistical challenge.”
He knows it’s a small thing, all considered, but that’s life under quarantine: when global problems are too intense to comprehend, you focus on the small stuff. And so, just as Chris takes progressively decisive action in the limited series—sailing with the freight; making a mad dash across the desert after his jihadist captors are detonated by drone strike; sacrificing heavily to make sure the drugs make it to their buyer—DeHaan’s been doing the same. “I've been breaking it down into something that I've started to call the TOD, which is my task of the day, because I think if I try to bite it all off in one thing, it would take me three days of no sleep.” The family’s been there over a month by the time we talk—his wife, the actress Anna Wood, was on pandemic alert early, he says.
DeHaan’s trying to keep busy, latching onto whatever bits of work he can, occasional dispatches from a career that feels a million miles away. “I've never been a very creative person in terms of wanting to create my own content, or put on a play in my backyard or that kind of thing,” he says. What does an actor do when he can’t act? He does what he can—throwing himself headlong into the photoshoot for this story, to start, spurred on by Wood. It was a nice break from routine: “When we were done, she said, ‘It's really nice to just actually have something real to do in terms of our business, and what we do, because we're all at such a standstill.’"
Dane DeHaan has come to his perch in the industry—in Williamsburg, typically; he tried LA for a few unhappy years before coming back—by focusing on that small stuff. His method is less Method than deep research: to play Chris, who suffers from Huntington’s disease, a degenerative condition, he went the books-and-interviews route. To prepare for his role as history’s worst Uber passenger on Quibi’s new told-in-chapters series The Stranger, he went deep on the power of predictive algorithms. (More on that later.)
The results have largely spoken for themselves. DeHaan’s always looked far younger than his age, but distinguished himself by bringing a veteran’s nuance to the job: at 34, he’s a 50-year-old character actor in a twentysomething’s body. He brought an easy menace to roles in films like Chronicle and Kill Your Darlings, and endowed his Harry Osborn with an entitled, hipster hauteur in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Gigs on the side with Prada and, uh, Metallica (a “thriller concert film” starring DeHaan in fictional interludes) established his cult-hero bona fides. Leading roles followed, in big swings destined to become cult classics: Gore Verbinski’s sanitarium freakout A Cure for Wellness and Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Fun stuff, to be sure, but maybe not the best use of his talent. And so, when the director Veena Sud approached him with the bad-guy role in a project she was developing for Quibi, the new chopped-into-segments phone-streaming platform, he was curious.
“It certainly felt like it was something I could do and was a part of my wheelhouse, but there was a showiness and self-awareness and almost a campiness to it,” he says, “that I thought it would be super fun to just let loose and chew on the material.”
What do you mean, wheelhouse?
“Well, the bad guy, villain, that kind of thing,” he says. “I've certainly played a lot of them, and a lot of different kinds of them. I've been all sorts of terrible people.” And anyway, it was time: “It had been a while. It had been maybe three or four years since I played a really bad, stereotypical villain type of guy.”
So he signed up. There was, first, the question of what Quibi was; with Hollywood awash in Quibi money (the service has so far raised nearly two billion dollars, and has inked deals with the likes of Steven Spielberg and Kevin Hart), his agents explained that one quickly. Then there was the matter of what to call it. On this, DeHaan is clear. “I call it a Quibi,” he says, smiling. “It's important to keep it as a singular thing unto itself.” He’s joking about Hollywood lingo, sure, but DeHaan also saw something in the format that he could work with. “The short episodic nature of it, and the pop culture-ness of Quibi in general, was important in how I viewed the project, and its chance of being successful,” he says. “I think Veena really understood how to use Quibi. So I'm not so sure I would have made this if it were a movie or a TV show. But as a Quibi, it seems to be a really good idea and I was super into it.”
And as a Quibi, it does indeed seem like a good idea. The Stranger spans a particularly rough night in the life of Clare, a new-to-LA aspiring writer making ends meet as a rideshare driver played by horror standout Maika Monroe. DeHaan is Carl E, a particularly vengeful passenger (and that beloved cinematic sociopath who’s willing to tell you he’s a sociopath). Being a Quibi, it unfolds in chunks—five to eight minutes long, cliffhangers baked in. To get into character as a villain who might be more than he seems (and who knows more than he lets on), he’d Google his costar, and ask the kind of leading questions for which he already had the answers. It wasn’t creepy, necessarily, but it wasn’t not creepy: “Actually, I don't think that she knows that I did that,” he says. That was the point. “It's important as much as possible, just for the purpose of chemistry or whatever,” he says, “to try, as safely and in a way that makes sense, to mimic the relationship in real life.”
The Quibi production moved quickly, burning through pages. ZeroZeroZero, which shot over the course of a year starting in March 2018, did not. “I made a lot of trips back and forth to Casablanca,” DeHaan says.
This—along with trips to New Orleans; Veracruz, Mexico; Erfoud, a Moroccan “oasis town” in the Sahara; and Dakar, Senegal—were key to the project’s realism, which is central to its appeal. (Large chunks without DeHaan were also shot in Italy.) The series, an adaptation of the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano’s excavation of the international cocaine trade, grafts fictional characters like DeHaan’s onto something like reality.
There is, to be sure, plenty of fiction. That $60 million shipment is basically the star of the series, with three narratives arcing around it: DeHaan and Andrea Riseborough’s brokers, those Italian mafia buyers, and then a Mexican special forces unit that warps itself into a paramilitary cartel outfit. Anecdotally, it has become a hit among the kind of viewer who worships at the altar of Sicario—folks who enjoy Narcos, but wish it weren’t quite so nostalgic; folks who are counting down the days until FX’s adaptation of Don Winslow’s Border Trilogy; folks who saw the series’ IMDb description as an “international cocaine drama” and experienced a small heart tremor. (Co-creator Stefano Sollima is responsible for Gomorrah, another Saviano television adaptation, and Sicario: Day of the Soldado, two of the more bone-crunching pieces of popular entertainment in recent memory.)
ZeroZeroZero is really mean, is what I am trying to say. Cynical about human behavior and clinical in its presentation of the reasons why. And little was spared, DeHaan tells me, in its pursuit of those qualities. “On the way to this set, we would always be like, "What's going to go wrong today? What's it going to be?" Because it was always going to be something, and it was always different,” he explains. “Whether it be a dust storm or turning around and seeing the first AD just projectile vomiting. The amount of food poisoning that happens when you're going to a lot of remote, questionable locations is at times overwhelming.” It’s the kind of stuff you thought they’d stopped doing after famously troubled shoots like Apocalypse Now: middle-of-the-ocean shots of a helicopter circling the freighter, for example, achieved with the use of another helicopter, moving the opposite direction. “They're just missing each other by 10 feet to get these shots,” DeHaan says. “Just insanity. Absolute insanity.”
That insanity is now in the rearview, replaced by the quiet, humdrum insanity that is life during a pandemic. DeHaan and his family are taking it in stride. “I'm just so lucky,” DeHaan says. “We have this amazing place up here, and we have lots of land, and we have a gym, and a grocery store that I go to once a week. I've fallen into a kind of rhythm.” So he’s spending his days putting together that new nursery, hanging out with his wife and daughter, and drawing on the kind of acting zen—control what you can control—you need to make a life in the industry. It’s not quite a multimillion dollar cocaine shipment. But it’s work enough for now.
First he changed the sound of popular music. Then he revolutionized fashion and sneakers. Now, Kanye West is redesigning the very building blocks of family life—food, clothing, and shelter—and he’s claimed thousands of acres in Wyoming as a test site for his ideas. We followed West from Cody to Calabasas, and from Cabo San Lucas to Paris, to see it all firsthand—and to talk to him about his next album, his “altered ego,” and his renewed faith in God.
Could you emerge from quarantine looking like that?
Originally Appeared on GQ
