Even Willem Dafoe gets self-conscious sometimes. Yes, the man who had his penis crushed in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, led a Norse ritual near-naked and on all fours in Robert Eggers’s The Northman, and played a disfigured mad scientist in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. “But the second you feel that, it means you’re blocked. You’re standing outside of yourself,” he says. “Self-consciousness is about not being there. It’s about expectations, it’s about pressure, it’s about judgment. To some degree, you need to have some sort of critical eye. But self-consciousness? You’ve got to trick yourself out of it, I think.”
Dafoe’s nearly 45 years onscreen have been an extended exercise in pulling that off. As a young actor, he dropped out of college to join an experimental theater company in Milwaukee, which led him to another in New York, which led him to cofound his own troupe in SoHo, known as the Wooster Group. When he began his film career at the tail end of the 1970s, he says, “My identity was still that I was a downtown theater actor.” The perspective it gave him was freeing. “I was working with people who weren’t approaching theater or film necessarily from a career point of view. It wasn’t a business to them. It was something they did because it turned them on, it thrilled them,” he says. “To start working the way that I started, it was counter to something culturally embedded in me as an American man growing up in a particular time. There was a desire to strive, to make something of yourself, and that can be creatively constipating. But that drops away if you learn there are other ways to be.”
Ironically, Dafoe has assembled the kind of filmography that most actors do indeed strive for. It’s one that comes with its own mythology: He famously got fired from his first movie gig as “a glorified extra” in 1979’s Heaven’s Gate. “We were in costume and full makeup in a lighting setup, standing in place for eight hours, just tweaking the lights. You had to raise your hand to go to the toilet. Someone next to me whispered a joke in my ear and I laughed, perhaps too loud, and Michael Cimino, the director, turned around and saw this punk kid actor laughing. He said, ‘Willem, step up.’ And that was it.”
Eight years later, Dafoe got his first of four Oscar nominations, a Best Supporting Actor nod for his role in Oliver Stone’s Platoon. An unflinching antiwar film, Platoon was based partly on Stone’s own experiences during the Vietnam War. “He was playing for keeps,” says Dafoe. “This wasn’t just another movie. This was something that he needed to do.” Stone pushed his actors especially hard, but Dafoe thrived under the pressure of playing a conflicted young sergeant.
Later, Dafoe starred in another demanding role in another long-gestating passion project by another auteur, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. He developed a reputation as a director’s actor. To date, his 150-plus acting credits include collaborations with a veritable film-school syllabus of celebrated directors: Wes Anderson, Kathryn Bigelow, David Cronenberg, Guillermo del Toro, William Friedkin, Werner Herzog, David Lynch, Paul Schrader, Sean Baker, von Trier, Eggers, Lanthimos—the list goes on.
The credits themselves are even more eclectic. Dafoe has played an iconic comic book villain (in Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man trilogy), a hit man (in Chad Stahelski and David Leitch’s first John Wick movie), and a fish (in Finding Nemo and Finding Dory). Next month, he plays a once-living B-movie star turned deceased ghost detective in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. “The beautiful thing about every new movie is that you get to remake your take on what you do as an actor,” says Dafoe. “It’s different every time. Different movies require different performances, different points of view. You have to bring something different to the game.”
In this too, Dafoe doesn’t overthink. “Willem has a lot of technique, but his ability to just be in the moment is pretty remarkable,” says Eggers, who cast Dafoe as a drunk seaman in The Lighthouse, a Viking jester in The Northman, and a vampire-hunting professor of the occult in this December’s Nosferatu. “He’s definitely a big believer in just doing and finding things through doing, and that the text gives you everything else you need.” Once courted by directing talent, Dafoe is now helping cultivate it. He reached out after the release of Eggers’s feature debut, The Witch. The two met over lunch in Manhattan, and immediately clicked. It’s a testament to their mind meld that Dafoe describes Eggers with the same language that the director used to describe him. “He doesn’t point to the [subtext in a script], and I think that’s true of most good directors,” says Dafoe. “The world they make is the world they make. There’s a logic to it, so you don’t have to step out of it, analyze it, and then bring your logic back into that world. The world reveals itself in the doing.” It's no wonder that directors like Eggers and Lanthimos, whose films flirt with a thrilling kind of inscrutability, keep coming back to Dafoe. There's no fun in talking things to death, and Dafoe is there, on some level, to have fun.
Which is why he may not be a fan of all this reflection and analysis of his own career. “You’re making me talk crazy!” Dafoe declares at one point in our conversation, extending his arms out to fill the Zoom window we’re chatting through. Or maybe he’s feeling philosophical, he says, because he’s in Greece filming a new movie. But if it’s philosophy I want, perhaps he has an instructive story to share.
For one particular scene in this movie, he’s had to learn a dance, and so he's been working with a choreographer. During one rehearsal, the choreographer told him about a time early in her career when she’d asked a teacher for advice on some steps that were giving her trouble. “She asked, ‘What am I doing wrong?’” says Dafoe. “And her teacher said, ‘You’re dancing too much.’ I find there’s a parallel to acting. You need some sort of discipline, and I think I’m very disciplined person. But sometimes you have to be a little looser. You’ve got to give yourself over to a magic that’s out of your control.”
Grooming: Amy Komorowski; production: Block Productions; set design: Kadu Lennox.
