The one director Willem Dafoe knew he’d never work with: “You’ve just got to let it go”
The conventional wisdom is that actors tend to wind down as they get older, but Willem Dafoe is a paradox.
With every passing year, he seems to crop up in more and more films to the point where he’s almost inescapable, and at the current rate, by 2030, he will be in every single movie ever released.
One of the reasons Dafoe has been able to work so much for so long is his friendship with a number of prominent directors, and as the years go by, more and more filmmakers seem to add the gravelly-voiced superstar to their stables.
He’s been a long-time favourite of Wes Anderson, appearing in six of the pastel obsessive’s films, Robert Eggers is clearly a fan, casting him in two of his three features, with a third on the way, and then there’s Lars von Trier, the twisted auteur with whom Dafoe has had a strange, “very intimate” relationship.
However, even the greats like Dafoe don’t get to work with everybody on their wishlist. Speaking on The Louis Theroux Podcast, the Oscar-nominated star was asked about why he’s never been in a Woody Allen movie, and as anyone who’s listened to this show will know, Allen is a preferred topic of conversation for the bespectacled documentary maker, so this was only a matter of time.
Dafoe had a very straightforward answer as to why he’d never gotten a call from Mr Allen’s office. “I’m not a New York type,” he admitted, “I’m not like a typical, Jewish New Yorker, and I’m not a blue blood, uptown guy, and he deals a lot in those things.”
When asked if this affected his view of the director, he replied, “You can admire a filmmaker or a film, and you’re just not part of their language. You’ve just got to let it go, you know?”
Like many of the actor’s favourite filmmakers, Allen often has favourites when it comes to casting, with his most famous recurring co-star being Diane Keaton, best known for her starring role in Annie Hall, but the actor he’s worked with the most is his ex-partner Mia Farrow. As a number of his films are either set in New York or tackle themes of Jewishness, it’s easy to see why Dafoe thought he wouldn’t fit in among his regular crowd.
Of course, working with Allen isn’t what it used to be as the once-acclaimed filmmaker’s reputation has been tarnished by a number of personal scandals, most prominently his romantic relationship with his own adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. A number of actors who starred in Allen’s later works have expressed regret for doing so, with Timothée Chalamet even donating his fee for A Rainy Day in New York to charity.
In the Theroux interview, Dafoe addressed this issue head-on. “It’s a whole subject,” he said, “But before the last ten years, I sometimes thought, ‘Wow, he’s never talked to me about anything’, but then I sit myself down and say, ‘You know what, I’m probably not right for anything that he’s doing’.”
