‘They nailed – in my humble opinion – the look of Mr. 3,’ says One Piece actor David Dastmalchian

David Dastmalchian appears on my laptop screen, smiling and apologetic. He’s a little late coming directly from a string of interviews, among which I am the last. What will follow is, Dastmalchian tells me, a well-earned nap before he picks up another night shoot that’s running from 5PM to 5AM.

I first noticed Dastmalchian more than a dozen years ago when he appeared as a psychotic, fake Gotham City cop in Christopher Nolan’s seminal 2008 Batman movie The Dark Knight. It was such a true and gripping performance that I wondered if Nolan had spirited the actor out of a “facility” on a day pass for his turn as the off-kilter assassin.

That’s how good and chameleon-like Dastmalchian is, a man who now appears as kind, convivial, and engaged as the Dark Knight’s Thomas Schiff was not.

A character actor and busy creator (he has a graphic novel, Through, available now and arriving at retail early next year), Dastmalchian continues to land memorable parts in large-scale IP-based films and TV shows. He took a little-known anti-hero, Polka-Dot Man, and turned him into a tragicomic hero with a major story arc in 2021’s The Suicide Squad, the James Gunn-directed superhero flick that acted somewhat as a testing ground for Gunn and Peter Safran’s now-nascent DC Universe (DCU).