If Dane DeHaan isn’t already a familiar face, just give it some time. While fans of HBO’s “True Blood” and “In Treatment” might already be aware of DeHaan, the 24-year-old Pennsylvania native has an impressive slate of upcoming titles hitting theaters over the next year. And he better get ready.
“I don’t know that I do spend a lot of time preparing myself for stardom,” DeHaan says with a laugh. “I try to just remind myself how lucky I am, and I’m just doing what I’ve always loved to do. I’ve never wanted to be famous, I’ve only ever wanted to be an actor. And for me, that is so much fun that I just look forward to that, and everything else is a really great side effect of that. I haven’t really reached a certain point where I lose a ton of my privacy or anything. So when someone comes up to me and tells me they really like me, I just say thank you.”
Of course he says that now. We’ll check in with him in another 12 months. What’s on the slate for 2012? DeHaan will also appear in Prohibition-era drama “The Wettest County” with Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce and Shia LaBeouf, as well as “The Place Beyond the Pines” opposite Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper and Eva Mendes. And next month he heads to New York to film writer-director John Krokidas’ Beat Generation drama “Kill Your Darlings,” starring as Lucien Carr opposite Daniel Radcliffe’s Allen Ginsberg. Before all of that, though, he stars in “Chronicle,” an inventive, found-footage-style science fiction film about a trio of high schoolers whose encounter with a mysterious buried object leaves them with awesome telekinetic powers.
“What I’ve found about working in movies is that I’ve had the opportunity to work with people who I really believe are successful and are celebrities because they are the best at it. Those are the people I want to work with. If that means being really famous also, then that’s OK with me,” he says, trying and failing to keep a straight face. “It’s like, ‘Oh, you’re going to be working with really amazing people, but you’re also going to be really rich and famous.’ Ask me again in 10 years.”
The Leo issue
Dane DeHaan is getting used to comparisons to Leonardo DiCaprio.
“I get that all the time — ‘You look like a young Leo,’” he says. “I think that if I was going to have to be compared to one person who was once a young actor, I might pick Leonardo DiCaprio anyways.” He’s even gotten the stamp of approval from his A-list doppelganger: “He actually came up to me at a party the other day and said hello. It was really a special moment,” DeHaan recalls.
