‘I STILL HAVE THAT FEAR, THAT SENSE OF NEWNESS, THAT CURIOSITY EVERY TIME I START A FILM’
I always skip onto set,’ Willem Dafoe enthuses as he talks about getting back to work after the lengthy SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike. ‘It’s like riding a bike, right?’ Certainly it could be assumed that for Dafoe, after four decades of challenging roles, many in era-defining works, emoting is now a muscle memory, easy. Like hopping on a bicycle. A pro who’s been on the big screen since his ill-fated 1980 gig on Heaven’s Gate (he was fired for laughing at a dirty joke on set), Dafoe has turned his hand to Oliver Stone war movies, Scorsese biblical epics, David Lynch crime thrillers, Lars von Trier provocations and superhero tentpoles. But the four-time Oscar-nommed character actor, who now primarily resides in Rome with his film-director wife, Giada Colagrande, disagrees. Chatting to Total Film from his Italian home, he looks younger than his 68 years, and his outlook is just as youthful. ‘Sometimes I’m happy with myself, and sometimes I think I’m a bum,’ he laughs. ‘But the one thing I know is that I always show up, and I’m always excited, and I have a good energy. How do you maintain that? By, you know, being with people that have something going on. They need to do something, and you help them do it.’
Dafoe has been helping auteurs achieve their visions since he moved from Wisconsin to New York to join acting troupes and was then lured to movies. He impressed with William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA, a springboard to his empathetic Sergeant Elias in Oliver Stone’s war-movie game-changer, Platoon. He was nominated for his first Oscar for the performance that brought audiences to their knees just as his character crashed to his, providing the indelible image for the film’s poster. He’s been Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, an FBI agent investigating KKK killings in Mississippi Burning, a Lynchian villain in Wild at Heart, a Wes Anderson regular, a Marvel meanie, an oil-swigging lobster fan in The Lighthouse and now the nucleus for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Frankenstein fever dream, Poor Things.
Yes, he’s also graced , and , but Dafoe has always bounced back to push the envelope. He’s portrayed the good, the bad and the ugly – a diverse practice that he admits keeps him ‘open’. ‘Different situations, different muscles – that’s important,’ he says. ‘It works against you thinking that there’s
