I just find it really beautiful.”ĭafoe was born in Appleton, Wis., and moved to New York in the mid-1970s. They’re articulated in the images and in the actions, which are very specific. But it’s also about identity, it’s about belief. “On one level, it’s a very simple story: two guys, trapped in a lighthouse, they run out of food, they start to drink, they go crazy, they get aggressive with each other. He was drawn, he says, to the specificity of Eggers’ script and his vision. He found this hilarious, but he also accepted my explanation of how much I enjoyed the performances: Dafoe plays a crusty, flatulent New England lighthouse keeper, breaking in newbie Robert Pattinson. He cackled when he forced me to admit, after a few seconds of stammering, that I admired The Lighthouse more than I actively liked it: “You didn’t dig it! You didn’t dig it!” You notice them especially when he laughs, which is often.
#WILLEM DAFOR MOVIE#
(He’s now 64.) He’s got the gloriously imperfect teeth of a theater actor rather than a movie star. His cheekbones, Adonis-like when he was younger, have been chiseled further over the years, like a rock formation that’s welcomed whatever wind and rain nature can dish out. When you consider how distinctive his face is, it’s astonishing that he has melted so gracefully into so many roles. That helps explain why every Dafoe performance, even the smallest one, is its own discrete, original entity. I’m happy, I got my plate full, I’m chewing away, and I feel alive.” You don’t worry about money, about the reception–any of that stuff. When you’re really in the process, you don’t worry about anything. You feel that every inch of the way, and that’s a nice feeling. He gets no help, he makes his stuff out of nothing, so you really feel contact with making something. “I’m attracted to people who are self-starters. “If you’re going to make something, make something that doesn’t point to anything,” he says. He revels in helping create something new. The point, maybe, is that Dafoe chooses roles based on what’s interesting to him–and what’s interesting to him is impossible to strictly define, perhaps because he’s always chasing after what he doesn’t know. In the other, Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn–adapted from Jonathan Lethem’s innovative 1999 detective novel–he plays the retreating sibling of a big New York power broker, a figure who represents the supremacy of love over ambition. But he also works frequently with cult filmmaker Abel Ferrara, and he seeks out emerging directors too: that’s how he found his way to The Lighthouse, a mystical thriller by Robert Eggers (director of the 2015 indie-horror hit The Witch), one of two movies featuring Dafoe being released this autumn. Dafoe has worked with big-name directors, like Martin Scorsese, and on big-budget pictures, like last year’s Aquaman. And if you try to draw any sort of thematic thread from one role to the next–good luck. “People say, ‘Don’t you want to direct?’ It’s like, Hell no! Because I’m not through with that performance stuff.”ĭafoe has some 120 film credits to his name, and the number grows every year. It’s for that reason that I’ll never tire of performing,” Dafoe says, once we’ve settled onto our park bench. “The job is always different, and you’re always calibrating in relationship to the people, to how you’re feeling.
It’s also part of the joyful discipline he brings to his work, a vocation he’s been building upon since he helped start an experimental-theater company, the Wooster Group, in the 1970s. But having a walk in the park–or even just sitting on a bench for an hour, with the sounds of city alive all around–is just one of the ways Dafoe lives in the moment. The idea of cherishing anything seems almost quaintly Victorian in an age when we spend more time staring at the mini computers we keep in our pockets than looking at the world around us. He’s not in New York often, and walking around the park and the city is something he truly cherishes about it. In advance of our interview, it was suggested that we meet in Abingdon Square Park, a small triangle of green space in New York’s West Village. Willem Dafoe–a man who has played a Spider-Man villain, Vincent van Gogh and Jesus–is charming even before you meet him.
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