“Almost as his duty”: the director Willem Dafoe called “perverse”
With almost 150 film and television credits under his belt, it goes without saying that Willem Dafoe has worked with an awful lot of directors. However, his inner circle of filmmakers comprises a much smaller group he’ll drop everything and run to should they come calling.
Robert Eggers is the most recent addition to Dafoe’s cabal, with the actor following up The Lighthouse and The Northman with a role in the long-awaited Nosferatu remake. When the star finds someone he likes, more often than not, he’ll make a habit of collaborating with them as often as possible.
Wes Anderson is firmly among that number after Dafoe lent his talents to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Fantastic Fox, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City, while he’s also made multiple features with Paul Schrader dating back to 1992’s Light Sleeper.
The four-time Academy Award nominee is on the cusp of adding Yorgos Lanthimos to that number after their quickfire Poor Things reunion on Kinds of Kindness, not to mention his three films with Julian Schnabel or the six he’s made with Abel Ferrara. Needless to say, Dafoe is clearly of the mind to keep his creative kindred spirits as close as possible.
Thanks to his penchant for embracing the outlandish, deciding early on in his career there weren’t many lines he wasn’t willing to cross, his intense features, malleable body language, and precedent for playing chameleonic eccentrics, it was always likely that Dafoe would never view partnering up with Lars Von Trier as a one-time deal.
It says everything about their work together that the unflinching intimacy of avant-garde drama Manderlay was their most conventional movie by far, although that was always going to be the case when the others include controversy magnets Nymphomaniac and Antichrist.
Even by his own boundary-pushing standards, Von Trier has done some truly fucked up things with Dafoe as part of his ensemble, not that the scenery-chewing villain of the decidedly less inflammatory Spider-Man franchise has any issues. If anything, that’s what he loves about the Dogme founder.
“Lars’ impulses are often perverse,” Dafoe told Roger Ebert in the cinematic understatement of the century. “He has an incredible knack for considering the taboo, the unthinkable, the suppressed thoughts and actions that reside inside of us. He has incredible technical facility as a filmmaker, but he subverts it, almost as his duty as an artist. He is also one of the most bitterly funny people I know.”
Everything he said about Von Trier on a professional level is unequivocally true, which is precisely why Dafoe enjoys their time together so much. He’s an actor who thrives on upending convention and expectation to deliver performances that exist completely outside the box, with the maverick auteur among the best in the business at doing the same from a technical and artistic perspective.
