Dane DeHaan plays a trouble-making intellectual opposite Daniel Radcliffe as beat poet Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings, and it's just the latest interesting role for DeHaan. The actor keeps racking up hot, eyebrow-raising roles — including the upcoming part of Harry Osborn in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and James Dean in the recently announced Life with Robert Pattinson. I sat down with DeHaan and a few reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival to chat about working with Radcliffe, as well as the coincidence of playing two roles James Franco has already played.
POPSUGAR: What was your experience working with Daniel Radcliffe?
Dane DeHaan: I had never seen a Harry Potter film before this. I wasn't honestly very familiar with Dan as an actor. I obviously knew who he was, but he was great from the start; he was even prepared in my audition. We became close friends fast. After meeting him and working with him that day, I immediately became excited to work with him.
PS: Why were you drawn to this project?
DD: I think that it's a story that I certainly hadn't heard before, and most people don't know, but everybody should, so that had a lot to do it with it. Plus, it was a really great script, and I just fell in love with the part and how complex and impossible it seemed. It just had all the elements of things I look for in a project.
PS: Were you familiar with beat poets like Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac before the film?
DD: I was certainly aware of who they were and what they stood for, and I had read some of their stuff, but it was more the story itself; it wasn't about being in a movie with characters whose books I really like. It was about telling this story, about how they became who they were in a really interesting and amazing way.
PS: What do you make of the fact that you are now playing two roles James Franco has already played (Harry Osborn and James Dean)?
DD: I don't really care. We're very different people. Our Harry Osborns will be very different. I'm sure our James Deans will be very different. I guess the only things that I see that we have in common is that we both had the opportunity to play both those parts. [Playing Dean] is going to be a really big undertaking for me, and I am really terrified, and it's going to be a huge challenge. Being terrified and being challenged — those are the two things that are important to me going into something. I'm really excited to tackle it and I have a bunch of time to prepare it, and I'm really looking forward to it.
PS: Or you could just choose James Franco movies.
DD: Oz the More Great and the More Powerful!
PS: How are you going to differentiate your James Dean?
DD: I'm going to look at James Dean. I'm going to study James Dean James Dean; I'm not going to look at James Franco James Dean. There's a whole wealth of material about the actual man. I think I'm going to stick with James Dean. And when I say James Dean, I don't mean the porn star James Deen [laughs].
PS: What else can you tell us about the film?
DD: It's kind of similar to [Kill Your Darlings] in that it's about who James Dean was as a person before he became famous. The person that people know as the icon James Dean — that's not who James Dean was. I think what's really interesting about the script is it shows how a normal person can be turned into an icon, even through just a series of photographs and some good work in movies. That's a really amazing thing. He's my favorite actor, and I will work tirelessly to honor that project as much as I can.
PS: Have you been thinking about how you'll pull off that famous James Dean hair?
DD: James Dean had the best hair in Hollywood. Yeah, I've been thinking about his physique and his face and his hair; everything.
Source.