Quentin Tarantino Skewers Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood, Calls Performance Weak Sauce

Quentin Tarantino went on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast and did what Quentin does: praised the craft, then torched the part he thinks breaks the whole thing. This time, he took aim at Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood, and said that performance is why the movie did not top his list of 21st-century films.

"There Will Be Blood would stand a good chance at being no. 1 or 2 if it didn't have a big, giant flaw in it ... and the flaw is Paul Dano."

"The weakest fucking actor in SAG."

Yes, he went there. And he did not stop at one line. He called Dano "weak sauce" and "the weak sister," and said the character work was "weak, weak, uninteresting." The comparison point is obvious: Daniel Day-Lewis. Tarantino thinks the movie is designed as a two-hander, with Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview clashing with Dano's Eli Sunday, but the performances are so lopsided that, in his view, the entire dramatic balance collapses.

What Tarantino actually liked (and what he did not)

• He says There Will Be Blood could have been no. 1 or 2 on his best-of-the-century list if not for what he sees as a major casting miss.
• The issue for him is Paul Dano playing both Paul and Eli Sunday; he thinks Dano is wildly outmatched opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, which kills the intended dynamic.
• He praised Paul Thomas Anderson's direction and Daniel Day-Lewis, talking up the film's old-Hollywood level of craftsmanship without feeling like a pastiche, and how it relies on story more than big set pieces.
• As a thought experiment, he floated Austin Butler as someone who would have been "wonderful" in the role, even though Butler was 15 when the movie came out. Point taken: he means a different energy, not literally teenaged Butler in period drag.
• All of this came during a podcast episode built around ranking the best films of the century, which is very much Tarantino's thing: say the quiet part loud, in public, and name names.

If you need a quick refresher: Dano plays both Paul Sunday (the brother who tips Plainview to the oil) and Eli Sunday (the preacher who becomes Plainview's antagonist). Tarantino's point is that the movie is engineered for a heavyweight face-off, but only one side, in his view, is throwing punches.

To be clear, he is not anti-PTA or anti-Day-Lewis here. He went out of his way to highlight the movie's build quality: the classical filmmaking, the narrative-first approach, the lack of flashy set pieces for their own sake. The critique is squarely about the casting and performance of the Sundays.

The Austin Butler mention is the spicy footnote. Yes, the timeline makes no literal sense, but Tarantino is clearly talking about presence, not birth certificates. And as is his habit, he is doing it in the most direct, turned-up-to-11 way possible.