Beat the devil
As he enters his fifth decade in film, Willem Dafoe takes on Vincent van Gogh — and makes a splash in Aquaman
Celebrating five decades in film, the masterful Willem Dafoe is just getting started
he has been jesus and a japanese death god. A prisoner of Auschwitz and an SS officer. A clean-cut fed and a lascivious sociopath with rotten teeth and a pencil moustache. A vampire, a priest and once, for an experimental theatre piece, a nun. TS Eliot and the Green Goblin.
Willem Dafoe, among the most distinctive actors of his or any generation, is also one of the most protean. Later this year, he will appear in both DC’s Aquaman, as the Atlantean scientist Nuidis Vulko, and Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate, as Vincent van Gogh.
Dafoe can seemingly play anything, except maybe a well-brought-up, middle-class Midwesterner, which, of course, is what he is. “I’ve got to admit,” the 63-year-old says over poached eggs and wheat toast in Manhattan’s West Village, “sometimes I look at my life and think, ‘How did I end up here?’”
Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, Dafoe left for New York in 1977 — the year of the blackout, the “Son of Sam” killings, and the wholesale arson of the Bronx — and fell in with an avant-garde theatre collective soon to become the Wooster Group. Together with the Kitchen, Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, they would help to shape a cultural moment that is now the subject of as much fascination as fin de siècle Paris or Weimar Berlin.
In 1980, Kathryn Bigelow cast Dafoe as the leader of an outlaw biker gang in her debut feature, The Loveless, and a series of reputation-making roles quickly followed: in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA, Oliver Stone’s Platoon, Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Even as he continues to work with contemporaries like Abel Ferrara and Paul Schrader, Dafoe has been embraced by some of the new century’s most original film-makers, from Wes Anderson to Lars von Trier to Sean Baker. He has been nominated for an Oscar three times, each for best supporting actor: first in 1986 for Platoon, then in 2000 for Shadow of the Vampire and most recently in 2017 for The Florida Project.
“I’m like the boy next door,” Dafoe once said of himself, “if you live next door to a mausoleum.” He is congenitally menacing. Yet off-screen, he is warm, well-mannered and surprisingly attractive. He moves with the earned poise of a dancer, a byproduct of four decades of physically demanding performance and 25 years of Ashtanga yoga. As the conversation progresses, you begin to get used to his face like you would any other. Every once in a while, though, his eyes suddenly pop open, his cheeks contract, and he flashes that crazed, gap-toothed grin.
Fifteen years ago, while filming The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in Italy, Dafoe met the Italian director Giada Colagrande, whom he married shortly thereafter. He now spends half of each year in Rome. “My heart’s in both places,” Dafoe says. “Italy still has very strong traditions. That’s a burden and it’s a blessing.” In New York, “it’s kind of a tradition of no tradition, except for money. New York is dear to me,” he says, “but it’s changed so much. For me, it’s a city of memories and ghosts.”
dafoe, whose real name is william, is the seventh of eight children born, in 1955, to William Dafoe, a doctor, and his wife, Muriel, a nurse. “I always feel like my first brother took the bullet for me,” Dafoe says, “because he became the doctor. And almost all my sisters became nurses, so I was able to do something else.” He adopted the nickname Willem as a teenager to distinguish himself from his father. By the time he was cast as the title character in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, which outraged the religious right for its depiction of a fallible Jesus, William and Muriel had been born again as evangelical Christians. (“I do not believe [our son] would do anything blasphemous,” Muriel told the Orlando Sentinel for a story about the controversy.) But Dafoe says his parents weren’t especially devout when he was growing up. “We would go to church as a family — it’s one of the few things we did together — but it was more social than anything.”
Still, the Protestant ethic was strong. William died at age 97 in 2014. “On his death-bed — I could tell he wasn’t going to be around much longer — kind of jokingly I said, ‘Well, what’s your conclusion? What is life?’ He took a long, thoughtful pause and he said, ‘Will, life is a test.’ Wow. That gives you an idea of what kind of guy he was.”
In 1973, Dafoe enrolled as a drama student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, then dropped out in the middle of his sophomore year to join a non-traditional local company called Theatre X. While touring in Amsterdam, Dafoe met Richard Schechner, the founder of the Performance Group, who told him to come to New York. So he did. “I was intending to have a commercial theatre career on some level when I moved here,” Dafoe says, “but then I found myself going downtown and seeing these loft performances. I felt an energy.” He began working as a stagehand for the Performance Group and quickly ingratiated himself into the collective, just as it was re-forming into the Wooster Group under the directorship of Schechner’s protégée, Elizabeth LeCompte.
To someone whose idea of boundary-pushing theatre is Hamilton, the oeuvre of the Wooster Group will seem almost aggressively confounding. One early piece, titled “Route 1 & 9”, mixed unlicensed excerpts of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town with pornographic video and Pigmeat.
“If you want to understand Willem, you really do have to understand his interest in experimental theatre,” says Paul Schrader, who cast Dafoe as a drug dealer to the rich in the 1992 film Light Sleeper, the best of their six collaborations. “It’s probably a larger part of his creative focus than motion pictures.” When asked what effect this background has had on Dafoe’s movie work, Schrader says, “It makes him more of a chameleon as an actor, because when he does these theatre things, he really gets outside his comfort zone — not only in terms of performing styles but also in terms of nudity and socially scandalous stuff. And that’s a comfort zone most actors don’t like to get out of. Willem is fearless.”
Soon after joining the Wooster Group, Dafoe became romantically involved with LeCompte, leading her to break things off with Spalding Gray, then another company member. “It was complicated, because we were all working together,” Dafoe says. “In fact, the three of us lived in the same loft, but we divided it in half.” (Dafoe and LeCompte remained partners for 27 years; they have one son, Jack, a 36-year-old judicial clerk, and a two-and-a-half-year-old grandson named Tom.)
Gray later became famous for his series of autobiographical monologues, notably Swimming to Cambodia. “This concept of turning your life into work interested me but also repelled me,” Dafoe says. “Sometimes I’d watch Spalding and think he was having experiences in order to create material. I was more down with finding a mask and actually losing myself. When you take on someone else’s actions and someone else’s thoughts, a beautiful thing happens. You learn something. You feel more alive, because there’s more possibilities. And then you’re beating the devil.”
‘When you take on someone else’s actions and someone else’s thoughts, a beautiful thing happens. You feel more alive’
in 1979, dafoe landed a bit part in Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, after hearing the director was looking for “ethnic faces”. He was fired for laughing too loudly at a dirty joke in-between takes.
“When I came to film, it seemed not that different than what I was doing, from an actor’s point of view,” Dafoe says. “From a social point of view, it was very different. Everyone was talking about their houses, and their horses, and their agents. I thought you were supposed to be talking about poetry, and paintings, and the beautiful books you’ve read. This was my romantic thing.”
Heaven’s Gate was a financial catastrophe that ruined its director’s career, sank a studio and brought the freewheeling interregnum known as New Hollywood to an end. “Auteur became a dirty word in America,” says Dafoe. “I think the people born slightly before me had a more fruitful period,” he says, citing Jack Nicholson. But, he adds, “envy is poison. Of course I have it, but I don’t allow myself to have it.”
Dafoe has “a certain art-house cachet, so he gets asked to do unusual projects,” Schrader says. “But when you’re in that situation, you have to be careful that you don’t take yourself out of the marketplace." In 2002, the same year he played a sex-addicted audiovisual salesman in Schrader’s Auto Focus, Dafoe assumed the part of Norman Osborn, aka the Green Goblin, in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. “It was early in this game,” he says. “I remember friends were like, ‘Really? A comic book?’”
Playing a superhero or villain was still regarded by most serious actors as a potential career-killer. Now it’s a job guarantee. The consensus shifted abruptly after Spider-Man became the first movie to gross $100m (£86.5m) in a single weekend, an event that transformed the movie business no less than the failure of Heaven’s Gate. Sixteen years later, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has out-earned all of Star Wars and James Bond combined. "They’re getting bigger, bigger, bigger,” says Dafoe, who spent five months in Australia last year filming Aquaman.
Whereas Spider-Man was “very handmade, a lot of the effects were mechanical”, Dafoe spent much of his time on Aquaman hanging from wires in front of a green screen. “I was almost never on terra firma,” he says, a challenge he welcomed. “The particulars aren’t there, so you can dream. It’s pretty pure pretending.”
Many actors say they do “one for them, one for me,” which in practice typically means one for the pay cheque, one for the prestige. For Dafoe, the ratio is more like one-to-five, and a number of the smaller projects he takes on never get an awards-season campaign, or even a proper release. Yet he continues to take his chances in the “Wild West world” of independent film. So when Dafoe says, “I believe in director-driven cinema. I believe in personal cinema,” it’s not just talk. It’s a commitment.
“He’s about experimentation,” says Sean Baker, who directed The Florida Project. “He wouldn’t take a role unless he saw something in it that he hasn’t done before. That catharsis thing.”
Has Dafoe been tempted by the “golden age” of television? “Not at all.” He concedes that “TV is what everyone talks about now. In many cases, it’s where the talent is going.” But, he says, “there’s a comfort in TV. It’s like getting a circle of friends for free. When you’ve got an hour-and-a-half to lay something out there, it’s more of a confrontation. It allows more of a shift of perspective and a greater possibility to challenge how you think.”
At Eternity’s Gate takes place during the last two years of van Gogh’s life, up to his suicide at age 37. Initially, Julian Schnabel says, “I didn’t want to make this movie. But somehow I felt I had to. I thought if I didn’t make this movie with Willem, we would be missing an opportunity that seemed to be implicit in the fact that the two of us even knew each other.” They met roughly 30 years ago at the now-defunct nightclub Nell’s, when Schnabel was a rising star of the “go-go” Eighties art market. Did Schnabel consider Dafoe’s age a problem? “No,” he says. “Vincent van Gogh was pretty world-weary and torn up by 37, and I think Willem is in pretty good shape for a 63-year-old guy.
"I never thought of using another actor,” Schnabel says. “There’s nobody else who could have done what he did.”
Among the challenges of playing van Gogh is painting van Goghs, which Dafoe had to do on camera. “Julian was a beautiful teacher,” he says. “He was very generous because you know goddamn well he wishes he was doing the painting. Sometimes he even talked to me while I’m doing it: ‘Go for the burnt umber! Mix it with the raw sienna!’
“How to hold the brush is huge,” Dafoe says. (According to Schnabel, “It’s more like holding a sword than a pencil.”) “If you start to hold it correctly, then you’re in dialogue with Vincent van Gogh. It really is a series of gestures and actions that make a thing, which is just like painting. Julian says there’s no mistakes in painting. You go avanti. You go forward.”
it’s early july and dafoe has already wrapped two movies since January: Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn, from the novel by Jonathan Lethem, and The Lighthouse, from the director of The Witch. Next he’ll fly to Puerto Rico to an adaptation of Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted.
He has two demands whenever he commits to a project: good coffee and a juicer. His morning ritual, even on-set, begins with meditation and yoga. He brings his own mat. “It takes about an hour-and-a-half, so sometimes that means getting up at 3am,” Dafoe says. “Maybe I’ll try to do it at lunch if there’s a very long set-up, but it depends on whether you’ve got a costume or makeup. Sometimes it’s impossible.”
Less well-known is Dafoe’s practice of keeping a journal, which he’s been doing “almost daily” for more than 40 years. “I’ve got books and books and books,” he says. About two dozen live in a cabinet opposite his desk in New York. Dafoe keeps the rest in storage. It's clear, paging through them, that these volumes will never form the basis of a memoir. Most are almost completely unreadable.
The hoarding of experience often conceals a denial of death. But if Dafoe ever felt a stab of existential angst at the irreversible degradation of his personal history, the feeling has long since passed. “I want to make a show of this, to wallpaper a gallery,” he says. “Sometimes the page will be totally indecipherable, and then certain words will stick out, and they’re really significant. It’s freaky — like, Ouija board-time. Really beautiful.
“Sometimes they’re very coloured by a film I’m doing,” Dafoe says, flipping through one notebook. He stops and reads a quotation from TS Eliot that he copied down while making the 1994 movie Tom & Viv, about the poet’s troubled marriage. “The kind of pattern which we perceive in our own lives only at rare moments of inattention and detachment… is the pattern drawn by what the ancient world called Fate.” He closes the book.
“I don’t really go back,” Dafoe says. “I never read them.”
Aquaman is out on 14 December; At Eternity's Gate is coming soon
‘TV is what everyone talks about now. I believe in director-driven cinema. There’s a greater possibility to challenge how you think’