Willem Dafoe’s unique definition of performance: “Not everyone can appreciate that”
It’s fair to say that over the last 20 years or so, one actor has stood above all others when it comes to excelling in challenging roles. From his blockbuster roles through to low-budget flicks and thanks to his partnerships with the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos and Lars Von Trier, Willem Dafoe has moved in and out of arthouse and the mainstream, never taking the easy option, always putting in a performance that stays long in the memory.
From playing the Green Goblin in Spider-Man to a disfigured genius in Poor Things to voicing a fish in Finding Nemo, Dafoe has accrued a vast number of films that show a frankly ridiculous amount of versatility and a never-ending amount of commitment to a role.
You can go all the way back to the seminal 1980s thriller To Live and Die in LA in order to initially gauge what a force Dafoe was likely to be – his unhinged bad guy counterfeiter is a memorably over-the-top menace, perfectly summing up the decade that taste forgot as he goes on a coke-fuelled crime-ridden romp around a hazy, sunset backed Los Angeles.
More recently, his performances have been far more understated but no less powerful. In Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, he sits and stews with Robert Pattinson to astonishing effect in a film that really shouldn’t work but somehow does. And with Lanthimos, he has begun making mainstream movies that sit way outside what audiences would usually put up with in their comfort zones for the likes of Disney.
Inside the method: Dafoe’s philosophy of performance
Over the years, Dafoe has spoken on the techniques he employs in order to wrench the most out of each character he plays, something that has served him well over 40 years of film. He told Roger Ebert: “Performance is about accessing the intelligence of the body that’s beyond what we can initially grasp. I’m struck by how many functions of the body are beyond our volition. Not everyone can appreciate that.
“The reality I always come back to is the fact that right now (through Zoom), I’m looking at you,” he added. “But what I’m seeing right now, wherever you are, it’s just an image of you. It’s mind-boggling! You’re in another place, but for this image of you to be accomplished in a sense, millions of things have to happen, from the technology that enables this to the eyes that behold you.”
One can sense exactly that wonder in his characters in some of his recent films and on the stage, where he has now taken up a role as the artistic director of the theatre department at the Venice Cultural Exhibition.
Perhaps what is most surprising about Defoe is that despite his incredible performances and some 14 different nominations, he has never been awarded a major acting award. He was widely expected to pick up an Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in 1987, thanks to his role in Oliver Stone’s searing war drama Platoon, but lost out to Michael Caine for Hannah and Her Sisters. Most recently, he was up for several awards for his performance as Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate, but again, somehow missed out on both a Golden Globe and a Critics’ Choice Award.
He said: “If you have respect for the body and its functions, then you appreciate that something is working through you. As an extension, you encourage that and you try to direct it with a particular kind of discernment. Once you commit and serve an action, there’s a kind of presence that’s alive and that’s one of the keys to performing, I think”.
Dafoe added: “This is particularly felt in the theatre because you’re seeing things as they’re happening. The temporality of the theatre is the beauty of the theatre.”
Dafoe remains one of the few actors who make you think that when you sit down in front of the big screen, you know that you’ll see magic happen. Very few actors can sustain such a varied career over some five decades and counting, and his desire to appear in challenging, controversial movies seems undimmed by experience.
He’s now going to be seen in A24’s The Legend of Ochi, a film that is something of a throwback in feel to those classic creature movies of the 1980s like The NeverEnding Story and Gremlins. It even has Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things, who seems to solely make TV and films that do exactly that. Dafoe plays Maxim, a father who believes tiny furry critters are responsible for his wife’s death and so naturally trains a group of boys to hunt them down.
One thing is for certain: as it’s Willem Dafoe, he will put in a performance you won’t forget.
