Willem Dafoe on the skills of Guillermo del Toro: “He’s playful, but he is also hardcore”
Owner of one of the most distinguishing faces, voices, and personalities in cinema, Willem Dafoe has notched up a litany of interesting roles with equally celebrated filmmakers. Sam Raimi, Wes Anderson, Lars von Trier, and more recently, Yorgos Lanthimos have all enjoyed fruitful collaborations with the much-memed actor. However, Dafoe crowns one in particular with gushing praise.
Straddling both mainstream blockbusters and arthouse darlings for nearly 45 years with those wide-angled legs the Internet loves, Dafoe was lucky enough to work with future and present-day film greats from the get-go. Starting with his first lead role in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Loveless in 1982, he went on to earn his first Oscar nomination for Oliver Stone’s Platoon. The following decade brought him more offbeat work suited to his roguish charm, appearing in films by John Waters, David Lynch and David Cronenberg, though falling back on large-scale studio tentpoles was also a necessity.
One director who has always navigated the difficult line between one’s creative vision and the big studio mandate of appealing to the masses is Guillermo del Toro. From his fantastical breakout, 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, the Mexican filmmaker is adept at cross-pollinating his nerdy fixations into big-screen wonders, from sexy undersea monsters to earth-shattering kaiju.
The pair finally crossed paths when Dafoe was cast in del Toro’s 2021 noir thriller Nightmare Alley. Taking stylistic inspiration from its 1940s source, the film takes place in and around a carnival, in which a con man and a psychologist clash for control. With del Toro’s macabre sensibilities and Defoe’s penchant for playing disturbed individuals, it was a match made in heaven (or, more appropriately, hell), and Dafoe is, unsurprisingly, one of Nightmare Alley’s biggest frights.
Speaking to The Playlist, Dafoe confirmed how much he enjoyed the project, giving del Toro the bulk of the credit. “I like his movies. I know him a little bit. He’s passionate about cinema. He’s talented. He’s fun to be around. To be on a set and after you do a take or you invent something or you have an idea, it’s music to my ears to hear him say, ‘I like that’. That’s a fair, not a great, but a fair impersonation. ‘I like that’. It’s about helping him do what he does because I like him.”
Comparing del Toro to other legendary filmmakers he’d worked with, Dafoe went on to commend the energy he brought to the set and the unique way his mind works: “He’s playful, but he is also hardcore. That’s an interesting combination. In a similar way, I’m always struck by… I can’t think of someone that mixes genres like he does so well. He makes these hybrids, that really can’t be identified, but at the same time always have his very personal stamp on them.”
Dafoe has continued to be ‘peak Dafoe’ since working with del Toro, playing a near-naked, rambling Norse mystic in Robert Eggers’ The Northman and even suiting back up to reprise his role as Norman Osborne/Green Goblin for Spider-Man: No Way Home, adding surprising pathos to the tortured villain. Del Toro has stayed on the path of adding his own spin to classic literature – adapting Pinocchio for Netflix in 2022, one of his darkest, most overtly political pieces yet, and creating a TV series for the streaming service, Cabinet Of Curiosities, inspired by his gothic roots.
Dafoe often works with the same directors repeatedly; his glowing words about del Toro indicate a reunion shouldn’t be off the cards.
