How one performance inspired Willem Dafoe’s unpredictable career: “It worked fantastically”
For the last 45 years and counting, Willem Dafoe‘s eclectic career has been a wonderful thing to behold. One of the few actors who has always kept a foot firmly in the arthouse world, even while working on the biggest blockbusters in the business, he has played countless wildly different characters in movies of all genres, all shot through with that unique Dafoe-ness.
Indeed, Dafoe has admitted in recent years that he is always cognisant of how filmgoers, critics, and members of the press perceive him, thanks to the outsized cultural imprint of some of his more flamboyant performances. He is aware that he can go to some pretty extreme places in search of a character, and sometimes that can result in his most wild-eyed, off-the-wall portrayals becoming fodder for memes.
In a way, being known for playing oddball, menacing villains and other assorted weirdos has been both a boon and a curse for Dafoe’s career. Even though it may seem like it sometimes, Dafoe is adamant that he never tries to go over the top with a character. Instead, he simply concentrates on delivering what a director needs from him, relative to the tone and style of their film.
“It’s like being a colour in an artist’s palette,” Dafoe explained, “and with each filmmaker, you represent a new colour.”
In recent years, Dafoe has established fruitful creative partnerships with two young directors he believes are invested in his range, “because they’re giving me different roles to play with each project.” This is music to his ears, as it means he knows “they’re not trading on the persona people have created around me.” These directors who understand the true scope of Dafoe’s talents and his incredible unpredictability are, of course, Yorgos Lanthimos and Robert Eggers, who have cast him in the likes of Poor Things, The Lighthouse, Kinds of Kindness, and Nosferatu.
At the core of his acting philosophy, Dafoe believes in completely inhabiting a role, however realistic or outlandish it may be. “I love the notion that you can do something and not be seen as an actor,” he told Film Independent in 2018. “You want to disappear.” Every time he looks at a script or imagines working with a director or a cast, he thinks, “Do I want to do these things? Are they compelling to me? Are they going to put me in a place where I’ll feel engaged, where I have the possibility to be transformed, where I can think with a new brain?”
However, despite this underlying philosophy informing Dafoe’s choices, which fosters a willingness to take on roles of all shapes and sizes, he still has insecurities like any other actor. Sometimes, he even worries that he’s not right for a part, and no amount of giving himself over to the transformation will help matters. In that situation, though, Dafoe tends to think of one performance he saw in his youth, which showed him that, in acting, anything is possible.
“When I think I’m not right for a role because I’m not enough like the character,” Dafoe told Criterion in 2024, “I always think of Burt Lancaster in The Leopard. I mean, this Hollywood guy that I’m thinking of from The Swimmer, he’s gonna be an elegant Sicilian gentleman? I don’t think so.”
To the young Dafoe’s shock, though, Lancaster – looking unrecognisable beneath a bushy moustache and mutton chop side burns – transformed himself to play Don Fabrizio Corbera, an ageing Sicilian prince in the 1963 picture. This rewired Dafoe’s brain because he was convinced such a believable metamorphosis would never have been possible.
“But, you know, it worked fantastically,” he smiled. “So, when you don’t think you’re right for something, you may actually be very right for it, or you might be able to find a way to get there.”
