Willem Dafoe’s brief ‘porn’ career
The career of Willem Dafoe is an absolute marvel. He’s starred in just as many blockbuster movies as he has in independent films with a wide variety of larger-than-life roles and those with careful attention to the minutiae of the human experience. Quite simply, Willem Dafoe is a force unto himself.
After supporting roles in the likes of Streets of Fire, Dafoe’s breakthrough performance came in 1988 when he played Jesus Christ in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Since then, we’ve seen Dafoe perform in Platoon, The Florida Project, At Eternity’s Gate, American Psycho and The Lighthouse, with each effort more varied than the last.
Dafoe’s first foray into entertainment came not initially in drama class but actually through a mildly pornographic short film he made whilst still at school in Wisconsin. In fact, the film was considered so raucous by the powers that were at Appleton High School that a young Dafoe was actually booted out.
Still, the actor maintains that the film wasn’t like a direct porn movie but rather an experimental effort featuring naked people. “It wasn’t really pornographic,” he once told The Guardian. “It was just a film about oddballs, including nudists.” It was enough for him to be expelled, though, that’s for sure.
Word has it that Dafoe had an idea for a school project in which he was to film a fictional magazine talk show with a Satanist, a nudist and a person who wanted to legalise weed, with all three being students. However, when a teacher saw what Dafoe was making, he got into deep shit.
The future actor was adamant that the nude scenes would not have actually made it into the final cut, but it was too late, and he was removed from the school register. In some way, though, perhaps it was a blessing in disguise because Dafoe soon began attending drama classes at a local university.
Dafoe wasn’t at the University of Wisconsin for too long because he quickly joined several experimental drama troupes, marking the beginning of his excellent career. He formed the Wooster Group in 1977 in New York City and would perform with them until 2005.
That early ‘porn’ incident would not be the only of its kind for Dafoe, though. He also starred in Lars von Trier’s film Antichrist but famously had to get a penis double because his own was, well, too large for the scenes. So maybe Dafoe had a burgeoning career in pornography waiting down his trousers all along…
