Watch the trailer for There Will Be Blood

Sometimes being an actor is harder than it looks. Especially if your name is Paul Dano and you’re having seven bells knocked out of you by the world’s greatest living actor. For Dano, a 23-year-old up-and-comer (he was the taciturn brother in Little Miss Sunshine), the delicate life of a thespian took a gruelling turn when his co-star Daniel Day-Lewis decided to bring some trademark realism to their remarkable new movie There Will Be Blood. Here, in a pivotal punch-up midway through the film, Day-Lewis’s imperious turn-of-the-century oil prospector Daniel Plainview was required to beat to a pulp and drag, literally, through the mud, his postpubescent nemesis, the greedy evangelical preacher Eli Sunday, played by Dano.

The assault starts with a punishing clatter from Day-Lewis, right across the side of Dano’s face. “I got slapped in the face for every take,” explains Dano, wincing at the memory, with a combination of wonderment and giddy pride (he is Bafta-nominated, as Best Supporting Actor, for the performance). “And that first slap always provided me with a good amount of inspiration. But then, after a couple of takes, someone saw the mud and added that into the equation. And sure enough, before long I’m getting slapped and dragged by the hair, and having Daniel stuff handfuls of mud into my mouth. It’s tough in the moment, but when you look back on it, it’s actually sort of fun.”

All, however, was not one-sided. A later scene would require the avaricious Plainview, in an attempt to impress the God-fearing Texan locals, to undergo a semi-violent baptism at the vengeful hands of Preacher Sunday. It was, suggests Dano, a chance for his character, and possibly even his own lower self, to even the score.

“Doing the baptism scene was such a treat,” he says. “In the first take I wasn’t supposed to slap Daniel at all, because it’s a long scene, and we had to get the first few minutes down before we get into beating him. But I’m pretty sure that I just forgot that and began slapping the hell out of him right from the start. And when they called ‘cut!’ part of me was mortified, and another part of me was thrilled about it. It is more fun slapping than being slapped.”

And yet, There Will Be Blood is about more than pugilism. This is an epic story concerning the corrosive effect of wealth and unchecked ambition on the souls of the two men. And though much has been said about the ineffable power of Day-Lewis in the Plainview role, few have recognised that it is a performance built exclusively upon the tension established between Plainview and Dano’s Sunday. Here Dano plays Sunday with a creeping sense of wounded egotism, and whenever he’s off screen the movie slackens somewhat.

Dano is keen to emphasise the bond. “He’s one of the most gracious people I’ve ever met,” he says. “And he’s a lot of fun, too.” He adds that, of course, to stay truthful to their respective characters they consciously distanced themselves from each other during production, and that once filming began in earnest, “I don’t think we spoke many, if any, words to each other at all.”

This, unusually, is not the first time that Dano has played the creepy antagonist to Day-Lewis. In The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005) Dano was Thaddius, a sneering tight-lipped suitor who threatened to sully the purity of Day-Lewis’s beloved screen daughter, played by Camilla Belle. It was another performance of magnificent insolence, suggesting that Dano could easily match someone of Day-Lewis’s stature on camera, and it marked him out as one-to-watch. Since then Dano has played a guitar-strumming Christian in The King, a disgruntled burger-flipper in Fast Food Nation and, most famously, a silent wannabe pilot in Little Miss Sunshine.

He is currently something of an eccentric heart-throb for a generation of female fans of the offbeat. “But I don’t consider myself somebody to be drooled over,” says Dano, groaning with embarrassment. “I’m a low-key guy, I wear glasses, and I wear scruffy clothes. That’s a weird concept to me. And it’s not something that I’m looking forward to.”

Dano sees himself as an accidental star. Growing up in Connecticut, he drifted into after-school theatre as a time-filling curio. Soon, however, he was singled out by talent spotters and, at the age of 14, was cast opposite George C. Scott in the Broadway production of Inherit the Wind. After which, a chance audition at 16 landed him a starring role in the controversial movie L.I.E. (in which Brian Cox plays a vaguely sympathetic paedophile), and introduced him to a career path in independent cinema. “I began to see film as something like theatre – full of people who were doing exactly what they wanted, and for reasons that I liked. It was an invaluable experience.”

Dano, who now lives in New York, will next be seen in the long awaited screen version of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. The movie, adapted by Dave Eggers and directed by Spike Jonze, will feature Dano and other notables, including Forest Whitaker and James Gandolfini, disguised as giant puppets (aka Wild Things), and prancing around the Australian jungle. Dano says: “We acted the entire thing out on soundstage first, then we brought that footage with us into the woods, and these giant puppets acted out our footage, but using our voices. It’s going to look amazing.”

In the meantime, Dano says that he’s trying hard to avoid being distracted by the media heat surrounding him and hoping that it won’t affect his choice of future roles. “If you are young and successful, other people will decide what’s good for you. But at a certain point only you can decide what’s best. So hopefully, right now, I can just be open and follow my gut.” And hope, clearly, that it doesn’t get duly thumped by any more overenthusiastic co-stars.

There Will Be Blood is released nationwide on Friday

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