Paul Dano's Real Name: Paul Franklin Dano

Quick answer: Paul Dano's documented full name is Paul Franklin Dano. A Guardian profile's biographical box records that form and dates his birth to June 19, 1984, in New York City. The same article's narrative says he was born in 1984 and spent his first years on Manhattan's East Side (The Guardian).

Real name and early life

He is known professionally as Paul Dano. The Guardian's 2016 profile says his parents were "not artsy": his father worked as a financial adviser and his mother stayed home to raise Dano and his sister. After the family moved to the suburbs in Connecticut, he joined the local Powerhouse theatre and began auditioning in New York. At 12, the article says, he landed his first Broadway role in Inherit the Wind, directed by George C. Scott. He later told the paper he had also harbored ambitions to play in the NBA and "kind of fell into" acting.

Career highlights

The Guardian dates his first major film role to age 16 in L.I.E., opposite Brian Cox. After The Girl Next Door (2004), it says, he considered leaving acting; The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005), opposite Daniel Day-Lewis and directed by Rebecca Miller, was the turning point he later acknowledged. He reached a wide audience as the silent teen Dwayne Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine (2006). A year later he played the Sunday twins in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Variety reported in 2007 that he had originally been hired for a brief turn as Paul Sunday and took on the larger role of Eli when the first actor in that part did not work out, after Anderson had approached him following The Ballad of Jack and Rose. The Guardian says that after Little Miss Sunshine he enrolled at the New School in Manhattan to study literature rather than move immediately onto a blockbuster treadmill. Later credits in that profile include Looper, 12 Years a Slave, a young Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy (a Golden Globe nomination), Pierre Bezukhov in the BBC's War and Peace, and Swiss Army Man, opposite Daniel Radcliffe.

Name notes for searchers

Paul Franklin Dano is the documented full name; the professional name is Paul Dano. Searchers looking for Eli Sunday in There Will Be Blood, Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine, or the younger Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy are usually aiming at the same person.