WRITER EXCLUSIVE
Puzzle Piece
Paul Dano goes from the big screen to the comic book page with The Riddler: Year One
Bats makes an early appearance in issue one.
→ WHENEVER HE TAKES ON A ROLE, PAUL Dano likes to chart out his character’s prior experiences beforehand. After Dano signed up to play the Prince of Puzzles in The Batman, director Matt Reeves was so impressed with his work that he passed it on to DC Comics, who then paired him with Serbian artist Stevan Subic on new mini-series The Riddler: Year One.
“One of the main things I do as an actor is [ask], ‘How do I get to page one?’” Dano tells Red Alert. “Building a backstory so I can take a life that’s been lived with me onto the screen. It’s the character, the body, the voice and all that… I usually tend to do a lot of backstory work and journaling, and because I had read so many comics in preparation for The Batman, it really made sense, because of its archetypal energy, to think of it as like choosing these key moments from his life as if they were an image or a panel. When I told Matt about some of the history I’d created, he was like, ‘That should be a comic’ and secretly I was, ‘Yeah, I think it could be a comic, too.’ So I spoke to DC and now it’s turned into its own thing.”