Trap artist
Willem Dafoe up for adventure with thriller 'Inside'
When Willem Dafoe was approached to star in “Inside,” a thriller where he realizes an actor’s dream and is alone onscreen for the entire movie, you might imagine he would leap at the opportunity.
But you’d be wrong. It wasn’t an automatic embrace, this role as an art thief helicoptered into a high-security Manhattan penthouse loaded with millions of dollars’ worth of art who finds to his horror that now that he’s in, he can’t get out.
“Inside” chronicles his struggles not only to be free but to stay alive when cupboards are bare, the heat and cold are bananas and no one can hear him scream.
“I liked the idea. I like the premise,” Dafoe, 67, said in a Zoom interview. “And then it was really a process to get familiar with the director “— Vasilis Katsoupis — “because that’s all very important to me. Particularly since it’s the kind of film that we would probably make in the room, when we were shooting.
“There would be lots of adventure. I had to really feel secure with a director who had done a documentary but had never done a feature before. So there was a little courtship.”
With over 100 credits on IMDb, Dafoe’s impressive output is the result of continually searching for intangibles. “I say ‘No.’ A lot. I like having something that I didn’t expect fall into my lap.
“The criteria is always different. One thing I’ve noticed is it’s got to attract me enough to interest me. But also, I can’t know exactly what it is. Part of doing it is finding out what it is. It’s going towards something. The second you know what it is, it dies. Then you’re just delivering something. “I like something a little bit beyond that, an adventure.”
With “Inside” Dafoe didn’t worry that his character is a crook, looking to leave with an illicit $3 million haul in Egon Schiele drawings.
“Yeah, he’s not a good guy,” the actor conceded. “But also, there’s plenty of people out there that’s probably cheering for him. They see that house! They see all that and they probably say, ‘Go get it, baby.’ Some people have an aggression towards wealth, and I get it.
“So that never entered into my head. The story really starts once he’s trapped in there. Who he is, what his morality is, what kind of guy he is, really comes into focus during the arc of him trying to deal with this predicament.
“Before that, I don’t think we were with him. Now, we’re with him because we can identify with his problems.”