Why Willem Dafoe loves dying on camera: “It’s not normal”
Over the course of his prolific career, Willem Dafoe has died many times onscreen. Surprisingly, the actor has grown fond of the abstract feeling that comes with facing a fictional death.
The art of dying doesn’t get as much credit as it deserves in film. Of course, some actors make fruitful careers out of it, namely Sean Bean, who has already died 24 times across a variety of movies and TV shows. Although a lot is said about the effect of a particular death in fictional works, you may wonder how the whole dying process affects the actor behind it. It’s easy to dismiss it as just a simple trick of fiction, but there’s something eerily real about seeing an actor stage a death onscreen.
I mean, to say Dafoe is no stranger to perishing on camera is an understatement. His range of creative deaths is so extensive that fans can pick a favourite. Many kids were left fucking traumatised by Norman Osborn’s tragic fate in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie, impaled by his own glider after failing to kill Peter Parker. Horrorheads might prefer Dafoe’s death in Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, where his character is attacked with an axe by his fellow lighthouse keeper. His most iconic death scene, however, is featured in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, where his character Bobby Peru blows his own goddamn head off with a shotgun. Dafoe’s opinion on enacting all of these shockingly violent deaths? A “beautiful exercise”.
“Everyone, unless they’re asleep, has an imagination about their death,” Dafoe told Empire. “So when you’re in a little fiction, getting to play out this kind of fantasy of imagining a version of what could happen to you, even in these extreme cases, something about that experience is elevated. It’s not normal. It’s very specific and it’s personal, but it’s not you, because the circumstances are not of your life.”
This comes from the guy who claimed it was fun to have 5,000 real rats on the set of Nosferatu, but his words wisely touch a morbid, yet astonishingly real fantasy that crosses the mind of every living person once in a while: what does dying feel like? Dafoe sees the act of dying onscreen as a way to confront the fears and worries we associate with death. The beauty he refers to has less to do with the nature of the death scenes than the liberating feeling of experiencing the catharsis of death separated from reality. His character may close his eyes permanently on screen, but Dafoe will be free to open them immediately after the director shouts “cut!”.
Dafoe’s eccentricity is always tenderly honest – no wonder he plays unconventional characters with such ease. He’s drawn to the occult and the strange. This says a lot about his range, but also reveals why some distinctive directors keep bringing Dafoe back into their projects. At this point, the idea of a Wes Anderson (not another fucking one. Get a grip, Wes!) or Robert Eggers movie without Willem Dafoe makes no sense. Yorgos Lanthimos is becoming another frequent collaborator of his. These are all filmmakers known for their penchant for the weird and obscure.
They find in Dafoe’s genuine sense of curiosity just what they need to bring all sorts of peculiar characters to life.
