Dane DeHaan: 'I couldn’t have pulled it off without Gabriel Byrne'

Why has nobody put Dane DeHaan into an F Scott Fitzgerald adaptation? He has the neat good looks you need for one of those well-off jazz-age socialites. and he has the voice. Debates on the Yale campus are carried out in that clipped, patrician tone.

No wonder the world swoons at DeHaan glance. Now 31, the Pennsylvanian has worked consistently since graduating from the University of North Carolina in 2008. Within two years, he had secured a role in the innovative TV drama In Treatment. He was in the hit sci-fi indie Chronicle. He was James Dean in Life. This week, he plays a Jonathan Harker figure dispatched to a Mitteleuropean castle where horror awaits in Gore Verbinski's indecently delicious A Cure for Wellness. All the outrageousness of 19th-century Gothic is here.

"That wasn't in my conversations with Gore," DeHaan says. "But you probably do have a grip on what they were going for. He had me watch The Shining and Rosemary's Baby. Tonally, that's what he was going for. Those were in our conversations about the cinematic inspirations."

I don't like to be surrounded by the movie business. I was cast in Spider-Man and that was shooting in New York for six months. I thought, that's my excuse. I'm not coming back.

DeHaan, a dryly funny fellow with decent manners, credits In Treatment with properly launching his career. Our own Gabriel Byrne played a psychologist who, in each episode, talked his way through the problems of his patient, including one played by DeHaan. I can think of no better man than Byrne to act as mentor.

Good listener

“I love Gabriel. I had such a good time working with him. I wouldn’t have a career in movies if it hadn’t been for that show, and I couldn’t have pulled that job off if it hadn’t been for Gabriel Byrne. When you’re just two people in a room, that’s difficult. In that show, if you got up from the couch, it counted as action. If you don’t have somebody who’s listening, it’s hard. He was always listening, and that’s invaluable.”

After that things really kicked into gear. I first saw him in the flesh at Cannes in 2012. Dane was there with John Hillcoat's moonshine western Lawless. There he was, sitting politely beside Tom Hardy, Nick Cave, Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska. He managed to look like he belonged.

“I was the least famous person in the room,” he says, adopting a conspiratorial tone. “The Weinstein Company wouldn’t pay to fly me. My agent used his air miles to get me to Cannes at the last minute. I had to stay on my producer’s futon so I could be a part of it all.”

I would never have guessed that. Anyway, DeHaan's looks and presence looks propelled him towards ever-greater prominence. He played Lucien Carr opposite Daniel Radcliffe's Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings. He had a decent part in Derek Cianfrance's The Place Between the Pines. I suspect that his role as Harry Osborn in The Amazing Spider-Man did most to change his life. It was a smart piece of casting. Few young actors could have made a better fist of the posh young man who becomes the Green Goblin.

“I look back on making those first films with great fondness,” he says. “I was young and everything was just happening. It was like a dream come true. Now I take more time to be a human. It was so exciting to go from place to place.”

Loss of privacy

There are, of course, always reasons to worry about getting what you really, really want. For a movie star, the loss of privacy is an unavoidable issue. Dane lives with his wife, the actor Anna Wood, in a fashionable corner of Brooklyn. My understanding is that stars get less aggro in New York than in most cities.

“People will stop me on the street,” he says. “But it’s not as if I live in Times Square. Ha ha! If I go on the subway, I will almost never be stopped. New Yorkers do leave other New Yorkers alone. You can tell somebody you like them. But you don’t bug people. Dan Radcliffe, who’s a friend, calls New York his ‘head-up city’ – meaning that he can walk with his head up there.”

That’s interesting. I would have assumed that LA was so groaning with stars that nobody would bother hassling either Dane or Dan. There’ll be another one along in a moment.

“Well, the problem is that everyone there is in the business: ‘Oh I’m an actor too.’ Then there’s somebody asking you to read their screenplay.”

I would imagine that, when playing James Dean in Anton Corbijn's Life, DeHaan leant lessons about Hollywood from that star's tricky history. It is sobering to think that DeHaan is already seven years older than Dean was when he died.

“He was always one of my favourite actors. What I learnt was that the image that was put forward of him was not really who he was. He wasn’t really in pursuit of fame. He wanted to act with the people he admired. One of the things you did have to compromise then was your image. You gave your image to the studio.”

Normal lives

There are upsides and downsides to the changes. Old Hollywood stars didn’t have to endure the pressures of social media (DeHaan has 180,000 Twitter followers), but today’s stars do get to live something a little like normal lives if they want. In the golden years, the studio would prefer Clark Gable to have a proper mansion in Bel Air.

"Oh, I was in LA for four years after In Treatment," DeHaan says. "It's not my favourite place to live. I don't like to be surrounded by the movie business. I am an East Coast kind of guy. I was cast in Spider-Man and that was shooting in New York for six months. I thought, that's my excuse. I'm not coming back."

The plan worked. His wife is expecting their first child in the next few months. Once he has finished promotional duties for Luc Besson's upcoming Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – the first trailer of which is gloriously barmy – he will return home for the arrival.

A worrying time to bring a child into the world?

“Well, yeah,” DeHaan admits. “But he’s not even going to be four in four years time. Hopefully, ‘everything’ will be over then. In eight years’ time, he won’t be old enough to remember much either. Hopefully, my generation has learned a lesson about this election. They will speak up and not let others dictate what happens to them. Right?”

I can’t imagine what he’s talking about.