Dane DeHaan on Valerian, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Philip Seymour Hoffman | Screen Tests | W Magazine

In this Screen Tests interview, actor Dane DeHaan (In Treatment, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, talks about his first role as Toto in The Wizard of Oz at summer camp, his favorite member of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, playing a superhero in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets", his longtime cinematic crush on Gwyneth Paltrow, and his appreciation of Philip Seymour Hoffman. When Dane DeHaan was around 12, he played Toto in a summer-camp production of The Wizard of Oz. Growing up in Pennsylvania, DeHaan (who was named Dane by his parents after the sexy priest in the best-seller and TV miniseries The Thorn Birds) had always wanted to be an actor. For most of his career, he has played some version of the charismatic iconoclast: Peter Parker’s estranged friend Harry Osborn, who morphs into the Green Goblin, in The Amazing Spider-Man 2; James Dean, in Life; and, most notably, Lucien Carr, a seductive, diabolical writer who captivated the Beat Generation poets in Kill Your Darlings. In July, DeHaan will graduate to hero status, in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, director Luc Besson’s dream project, which is, with a reported budget of $180 million, the most expensive European movie ever made. Based on a beloved French comic series—that DeHaan and most Americans have never read—Valerian is, to use DeHaan’s words, a space bro. While DeHaan talked about the bigness of Valerian, he was distracted by two dogs, who were fighting with great intensity over