Willem Dafoe names his most divisive role: “Some people like it, some people don’t”
The erotic thriller is a movie genre that has come in and gone out of fashion over the decades, but it is also one that has endured. The fact that audiences enjoy that heady mix of danger, sex and intrigue is possibly not surprising, but, unfortunately, the quality of the films in the bracket is certainly a mixed bag, to put it mildly.
That’s not an issue that Willem Dafoe usually has, however. Despite scandalously never winning an Oscar, the 69-year-old has put in some astonishing performances in classics like The Lighthouse, Platoon, The English Patient and many more.
He has also had his dalliances with erotic thrillers too: To Live and Die in LA could be classed as a 1980s example, with Dafoe in an unhinged early role as the crazy counterfeiter being hunted down by two Secret Service agents. It had some pretty racy scenes of its own: one between leading man William Petersen and Dalanne Flugel was incredibly explicit for the time, with director William Friedkin entreating the two actors to “make it as real as possible. Make it real”.
Steamy as that movie was, it isn’t classed strictly as an erotic thriller, certainly not in the league of Basic Instinct, the 1992 slasher romp that made Sharon Stone a global star and launched a raft of copycat efforts.
One of those copycats was undoubtedly Body of Evidence made just a year later, a movie in which Dafoe teamed up with Madonna to make a film that many thought was indeed a poor man’s rip-off of Basic Instinct, and that included some scenes that were far-fetched enough to inspire laughter from audiences rather than arousal. One of them, in which Madonna stripped in order to get acupuncture, resulted in some describing her as simply looking like a fairly sexy hedgehog.
Reviews were predictably not kind upon its release, with many panning the acting and the script. It has since gone down as one of Roger Ebert’s most hated films of all time, earning a Rotten Tomatoes rating of just eight percent, and even the great Julianne Moore has spoken about how she regretted appearing in it.
Looking back on the film, Dafoe is aware of its failings but doesn’t take it too seriously, telling Louis Theroux, “People that didn’t care for it, they thought it was a knockoff of that [Basic Instinct]. I don’t think that was it. It was kind of an old-fashioned courtroom drama thing with this sex spin on it. Madonna was doing her Sex book then, she was at the height of her sexiness, and I think, I don’t know, I won’t judge a movie, but some people like it, some people don’t. What can I say?”
He certainly has some memorable moments in the film, most notoriously engaging in some hot wax play with Madonna and getting it on while standing on the bonnet of a car in a basement.
But the concept and the execution of the movie, it’s fair to say, aren’t good. It’s possibly not quite as bad as that other Basic Instinct rip-off, Sliver, in which Sharon Stone tried to repeat the trick but failed as William Baldwin convinced her to sleep with him solely by virtue of being rich and having lots of security cameras, but it’s a close run thing.
And it seems this country especially is not one to let sleeping dogs lie, especially when that dog happens to be a best-forgotten erotic thriller with Madonna in it, as Defoe confirms, saying, “You know, every time I come to the UK they give me a hard time about Body of Evidence,” he laughed, “but if I’m in a Latin American country, they love it.”
