Paul Dano Had Difficulty Sleeping After Playing The Riddler In 'Terrifying' Role

It's not long now until we get to feast our eyes on The Batman.

The much-anticipated movie is due to be released on 4 March, and DC fans might be too giddy to get to sleep as that date creeps closer and closer.

For Paul Dano, drifting off at night also presented a problem while shooting the film.

The 37-year-old plays Edward Nashton, aka the Riddler - a serial killer who targets the elites of Gotham City.

To play the part, he had to go to a dark place, and one particularly 'intense' scene gave him trouble sleeping.

LANDMARK MEDIA/Alamy Stock Photo

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, he said: "There's a sequence with Peter Sarsgaard's character [Gotham district attorney Gil Colson]. That was intense.

"There were some nights around that I probably didn't sleep as well as I would've wanted to just because it was a little hard to come down from this character.

"It takes a lot of energy to get there. And so you almost have to sustain it once you're there because going up and down is kind of hard."

He compounded this sleep deprivation with a costume idea of his own. He suggested that his careful killer character might cover himself in plastic wrap, in order to prevent him from leaving DNA at crime scenes.

Director Matt Reeves was a big fan of the idea, but after an hour of trying it, Dano just needed an actual big fan.

He recalled: "My head was just throbbing with heat.

"I went home that night, after the first full day in that, and I almost couldn't sleep because I was scared of what was happening to my head.

"It was like compressed from the sweat and the heat and the lack of oxygen. It was a crazy feeling."

Alamy

Thankfully, the costume department were able to find a way to get more oxygen into the mask and make things a bit more bearable for Dano.

The actor had always wanted to be in a superhero movie, and when Reeves reached out with the script for The Batman, he knew it was his time.

He said: "[I was] waiting for the right one or ones, where you're in collaboration with people and material that excites you. And this was definitely that.

"I was totally surprised, frankly, that [the script] was so good. I felt immediately [on] page one, page two, you could tell that the director was seeing the film that they wrote.

"You could feel, even in the action scenes, the type of energy behind the fighting or the violence, it was just very fully conceived."

Not long now folks until we get to see for ourselves.

Topics: TV and Film, Batman

Jake Massey

Jake Massey is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from Newcastle University, where he learnt a bit about media and a lot about living without heating. After spending a few years in Australia and New Zealand, Jake secured a role at an obscure radio station in Norwich, inadvertently becoming a real-life Alan Partridge in the process. From there, Jake became a reporter at the Eastern Daily Press. Jake enjoys playing football, listening to music and writing about himself in the third person.

@jakesmassey