The 1988 role Willem Dafoe called the hardest he’ll ever play: “It sounds stupid”
No one ever said that acting was going to be easy. It’s the kind of job that looks endlessly alluring, with its award shows and opulent parties, but of course, that’s only one side of it. To get there, you have to put yourself through some pretty gruelling work, and Willem Dafoe will be the first to tell you that.
The actor’s career has spanned decades, and he’s worked with everyone from John Waters to Robert Eggers and Lars von Trier, equally attuned to the weirder side of the cinematic landscape as he is to the slightly more conventional one. As a result, we’ve seen Dafoe in some pretty bizarre roles, from the truly grotesque Bobby Peru in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart to the strange scientist Godwin Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things.
Out of all of his many impressive roles, though, was one that he saw as his biggest challenge, purely because it was so physically demanding. “It sounds stupid, but I think Last Temptation was important because that was a movie that when I finished it, I felt so spent, not in a method actor way, in a purely physical way,” he told The Independent.
Martin Scorsese’s controversial The Last Temptation of Christ saw Dafoe step into the role of Jesus Christ, which was never going to be an easy feat. Besides the stress of playing a figure who has been devoutly worshipped for centuries, especially in a film that contained sequences many particularly pious people deemed as blasphemous, the actor’s body was also put through the wringer.
“It demanded a lot from me, and when I was done, I was done, and that was such a good feeling,” he said. The film was shot in the extreme heat of Morocco, which is enough for anyone who isn’t used to working in such a hot climate. To make things worse, though, Dafoe had to be fixed to the cross, and with such a large amount of screen time, he had little respite from shooting.
The actor ended up with a fever, and he even went temporarily blind after using eye drops to make his pupils more dilated, but when you’ve got a film to shoot on a tight budget and schedule, there’s not much time for recovery. So, Dafoe had to keep going, and the relief he felt when it was over was unlike anything he’d experienced before.
Reflecting on the difficulties of shooting the film with Entertainment Weekly, he said, “I have so many memories from filming because it’s vivid in my imagination, still. I can remember very specific scenes and sensations because it was one of the most demanding roles, physically, for me. It was full-on.”
He added, “[The hardest part] was being on the cross. Regardless of your religious upbringing, you have a strong association of what that is, and then when you take it onto your body, it’s very powerful. I was on this big hill in rural Morocco and could see for miles. and the sky was blue, blue, blue.”
The hard work paid off, though, and the movie was acclaimed by critics. Yet, opposition naturally came from many religious people who were unimpressed with the way Scorsese depicted a sacred figure, and in one case, a cinema was even bombed by terrorists.
