The director Willem Dafoe is “a total cheerleader” for: “He’s great”
Some of the greatest actors in Hollywood have found success thanks to repeated collaborations with specific directors – ones who become more than just a creative partner but a close friend, too.
From Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese to Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart, these trusting relationships have helped to foster some solid performances; clearly, the mutual understanding between frequent director-actor collaborators unlocks something for both parties, allowing them to work to their full potential.
It’s always nice to see an actor return to a director – just look at all of the stars who kept coming back to David Lynch, for example. Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, Harry Dean Stanton, the list goes on. When that many stars are eager to return to a specific director, then there must be something special about them.
For Willem Dafoe, there’s a specific modern filmmaker who he can’t help but come back to, and he’s not alone in his love for the director. Of course, I’m talking about Robert Eggers, who has already assembled plenty of frequent collaborators across his career, which began with his acclaimed 2015 feature The Witch, a movie that led the ‘elevated horror’ charge of the 2010s.
The film starred Anya Taylor-Joy, who then begged Eggers to cast her in his next movie, The Lighthouse, even though he didn’t have a role for her. She just wanted to work with him again, but it wasn’t until 2022’s The Northman that she’d get to finally reunite with him. Meanwhile, more impressively, her co-star Ralph Ineson has starred in every Eggers film apart from The Lighthouse. Tying with Ineson as the actor to have starred in the most Eggers movies is Dafoe, though, who first collaborated with him on The Lighthouse, and hasn’t looked back ever since.
He was then Heimir the Fool in The Northman, Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz in Nosferatu, and will appear as ‘Hunter’ in Eggers’ upcoming gothic folk horror movie Werewulf. “I’m a total cheerleader for him,” Dafoe told Interview Magazine.
“He’s great,” he added, “It’s a curious thing for a guy to make smaller films and then go to a very big film. Sometimes they can fall on their face. And even though I haven’t seen The Northman, I was impressed by how he approached the material with the same kind of care.”
Eggers has quickly ascended the Hollywood ranks with his distinctive brand of immersive horror, with The Witch costing just $4million and The Lighthouse $11m, before he suddenly got the freedom to work with $70m on The Northman. Revelling in gothic period worlds, his movies often deal in the unknown, in innate human fears and the flimsy barrier between reality and the supernatural.
It’s hardly a surprise that Dafoe, who loves anything a bit off-kilter and unconventional, has become a frequent Eggers collaborator, then. For as long as the pair are both making movies, it seems like they’ll continuously be drawn back to one another, an inescapable magnetic pull bringing them together.
