Burger King

NEW YORK — Paul Dano’s critically acclaimed performances in this year’s “The King” and “Little Miss Sunshine” have established him as one of indie film’s must-watch stars. But that doesn’t always cut it in real life. Just ask the actor about the tough time he had while researching his role in Richard Linklater’s “Fast Food Nation,” out Friday.

“I tried to get a job at a few McDonald’s down by me,” says Dano, who lives in the East Village. “I actually wasn’t able to.”

While Dano may not have a future flipping burgers, his film career is clearly on the rise. Ever since his breakout role as a grief-stricken teen in 2001’s “L.I.E.,” the New York-born, Connecticut-bred actor has been steadily working his way through intelligent, provocative parts in movies such as “The Ballad of Jack and Rose.” Film is actually a relatively new love for Dano, 22, who grew up as a theater kid, acting in school plays and quickly progressing to Broadway by the time he was in middle school.

“At that point, I took it very seriously, but I didn’t know what it was going to lead to. Certainly, I remember making it to my basketball games was just as important,” says Dano, who is a junior-year literature major at The New School. But the actor now finds himself fully taken with the film medium, and he is careful to go after roles that he finds challenging — and to keep the less diverse material by the wayside. In “The King,” he was a Christian rocker who met an early demise at the hands of Gael García Bernal; “Little Miss Sunshine” saw him as Dwayne, a Nietzsche-loving teen who had taken a vow of silence. And he has just finished shooting Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” along with Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.”

As for “Fast Food Nation,” in which he plays Brian, a disaffected suburban youth working in a Mickey’s Fast Food in Cody, Ohio, Dano was attracted by more than just the politically charged graphic slaughter scenes. “Normally, you hear about some brutality of animals or you hear people are getting paid minimum wage. But if you don’t get paid minimum wage, that might be hard to relate to,” he says. “The great thing about the script was how we see a lot of people, normal people, good people, people like ourselves, kind of caught in a system that is way bigger than them and controlling them. And sometimes there isn’t much they can do about it because of their own personal circumstances.”