Lisey's Story's Dane DeHaan reveals he, too, was a victim of the "'90s yo-yo craze"
Dane DeHaan admits he has a muscle memory for yo-yo tricks, and discusses the creation of his unsettling villain
Up until the AppleTV+ series’ most recent episode, Dane DeHaan’s Jim Dooley has been a menacing presence largely lingering on the outskirts of Lisey’s Story. A superfan of the late author Scott Langdon (Clive Owen), Dooley shares DNA with another Stephen King creation, Misery’s Annie Wilkes, as the two clearly feel a sense of ownership over their favorite writers’ work and will stop at nothing to access it. In “Jim Dandy,” that dark, unfettered fandom leads to Dooley’s most brutal confrontation with Lisey (Julianne Moore) yet, beating and berating Langdon’s widow until she tells him the whereabouts of the authors unpublished work that may or may not exist.
Dooley is a thoroughly unsettling villain, and DeHaan, King, and series director Pablo Larraín paint him as id personified, juvenilizing Jim through distinctive characteristics: The big yellow coat, the wild temper, and—most notably—the yo-yo. It’s that yo-yo that has The A.V. Club most intrigued, so we spoke with DeHaan about it, and here’s what he had to say about having to brush up on his yo-yo skills for filming:
I was certainly a victim of the ‘90s yo-yo craze. I definitely had a lot of yo-yos at one point in my life… but they did hire this professional yo-yo-er to teach me some other stuff, but—when we got to working together—he felt like the yo-yo they were giving me for the show, [laughs]—it really was from a cereal box, you know? And he was just like, “there’s not much you can do with this thing,” because he has these crazy yo-yos that you spin for minutes at a time. So, aside from “Walk The Dog” and “Rock The Cradle,” which I still kind of had muscle memory [of,] there wasn’t too much more to learn.
In the video above, DeHaan further discusses the creation of the character—one that differs from its inspiration in the novel—and the privilege of collaborating with King and Larraín.
New episodes of Lisey’s Story stream exclusively on AppleTV+ every Friday
Image Credit: AppleTV+