Rising to the occasion

NEW YORK — PAUL DANO was only 5 feet 6 when he entered his last year of high school, but never worried that he was doomed to remain small. His father and older brother were big and he had those looong feet -- size 12, incredibly narrow. "I always told my friends, 'Guys . . . I'm gonna grow,' " Dano recalls, and he did, spurting 7 inches, making him just like those feet -- long and skinny.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson at first envisioned having a boy of 12 or 13 play the fledgling preacher in "There Will Be Blood," the character who takes on the ruthless oilman played by Daniel Day-Lewis. But after deciding that such casting was "ridiculous," Anderson still didn't give the part to Dano, who had auditioned for it just off his success as the brooding, mute older brother in the black comedy "Little Miss Sunshine." Though Dano did get a small role in the oil epic -- as the preacher's brother Paul -- that character had only one scene, so he brought little more than a change of underwear and a fresh T-shirt to the remote shoot in Texas.

The principals in the film are diplomatic when asked whether it's true that the actor who had been slated to play the preacher had to be replaced -- within days -- because he wasn't up to going head-to-head with Day-Lewis' intensity. "Whatever the problem was," insists Day-Lewis, "I absolutely don't believe it was because he was intimidated by me."

But Dano, who was 22 at the time of the filming, understood what he was getting into when he leaped up to second billing, suddenly playing both Paul and now the preacher, Eli Sunday. He'd worked with Day-Lewis once before, after all -- on 2005's "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" -- and had gotten videos of most of the Ireland-based actor's other films, including "Gangs of New York," in which Day-Lewis as the murderous Bill the Butcher arguably overwhelmed the actor who played his foil, Leonardo DiCaprio.

When the camera light goes on, you see why Day-Lewis is "known to be extreme in his investment in his work," as Dano puts it. The point is, either that scares the bejesus out of you, or it doesn't. "I think that is something to sort of be turned on by rather than be scared by," Dano says. "You know, it's like a game almost."

So, "when I first got down in Texas and we figured out this whole part thing" -- that he'd play the preacher who is instantly wary of oilman Daniel Plainview -- "we talked about it a little bit." Then? "Once we started working, I don't think we spoke to each other much at all."