WILLEM DAFOE
Poor Things’ mad scientist dissects the appeal of the year’s most surreal and goofily sexy comedy
★★★★★
It was only a matter of time before Willem Dafoe worked with Yorgos Lanthimos, and the result is everything you might expect and more. In Poor Things, the actor plays Dr. Godwin Baxter, a Scottish scientist given to sewing dog’s heads onto chickens, and we meet him after completing the most important experiment of his life: by transplanting an infant’s brain into the skull of its dead mother, he creates the anarchic and wholly unpredictable Bella (Emma Stone). It may sound creepy, most likely because it really is, but Dafoe brings a surprising sadness to the role. Here, he reflects on the film’s strange, unique world.
Yorgos Lanthimos seems like a good fit for you. Did you lobby to work with him?
I follow his stuff, but, no. For this, one day someone called me up and said, “Yorgos Lanthimos wants to talk to you.” And then Emma and Yorgos called me, told me the rough story, said where it came from, what the role would be, and I said, “Great! When?”
As simple as that?
It really was. It really was.
Was it your choice to play Dr. Godwin Baxter with a Scottish accent?
No, it was written like that. I think it’s important to show that he’s an outsider in every way. Of course, his face makes him an outsider, and that becomes established very clearly when he talks about people being afraid of him, and the fact that he doesn’t like to go outside. He’s a brilliant scientist, but he’s in London, and he ain’t English. So that was important to distinguish him from the others and put him a little outside of that society.
Did you look into the science of it?
I had that up my sleeve. I mean, I really grew up around medicine, because I come from a medical family. When I was a kid, my parents worked together, so when I’d finished school, sometimes I’d go and sit in a spare examination room, doing my homework. And then when I got older, when I was a teenager, I was a janitor at the clinic. So… Needles, blood, urine, all that stuff—every night I’m dealing with it
because I’m the garbage man. And my father used to take me on his rounds. I guess something about it is titillating to me, whether it’s putting on scrubs or being in an operating theater, lecturing in front of a cadaver. I’ve seen my father operate. I’ve seen my brother operate. I’ve been there for operations, and I’ve been around cadavers and things like that.
Did Yorgos know that?
I don’t think so. It’s funny, I was in my study in New York when I received the call [from Yorgos and Emma]. I’m sitting there, and they’re talking, and as they’re describing the movie to me, I’m looking around the room. Now, I’ve got a huge portrait of my father behind me, and they’re talking about this character being a big father figure, the creator, and I see this huge portrait of my father. Not because I’m hung up on my father, but I did a movie once where they made portraits of three generations of my family, and they were really good. When the movie finished, they said, “Do you want these?” And I said, “Yeah, I’ll take ’em!” So, my father’s portrait is on one side, and then over on the other is a big photo of Marina Abramović. She’s standing over a cadaver with the organs all out, in a kind of Jesus pose. So, I thought, “Hmm, something’s in the air.”
How was the character’s facial makeup described to you?
In the script? I can’t remember. But they described it to me. They told me he was disfigured, and they said there was going to be some makeup involved, and there was going to be some prosthetic body parts. Once I said yes, and we started working, Yorgos would send me mock-ups of what they were designing, and I would give him some feedback. I mean, his team had strong ideas, but we were there for the development of them.
There were lots of fittings because there was a lot of tweaking. To be part of that process gives you more history for the character and takes you away from yourself. It puts you there [in the world of the film], which is beautiful. The best thing a director can do is make a really complete world, one that’s so complete that you can enter it and you don’t feel the stress of having to invent things. It’s all there, and your work is really to be able to receive it and let something happen. I think that’s the actor’s work.
How do you work with prosthetics? Do they have to make sense to you?
I think if they didn’t, yeah, I’d be asking questions. But the prosthetics in this are beautiful. I mean, it tells you volumes, and it identifies who he is very quickly. It’s sort of beautiful that he’s the creator and he’s also the monster. And I like so much the idea that he’s not a crybaby. He is had this horrible life, and he’s trying to figure out what motivated all that. So, he takes the higher road and decides that it was all for science, because science is important. That’s a very Victorian idea, as I understand it, the idea of self-improvement: “We’ve had the industrial revolution, now we’re going to get society sorted.”
So, he’s very much a product of that, even though serious damage has been done. He can’t have sex. He goes out on the street and people are repelled by him. He’s got problems with his digestion. [Laughs] I love the idea that when he finds a body and there’s a baby inside, he’s like, “Oh, this is such a gift. There’s only one thing to do. This is so clear. I have no choice. I must put the baby’s brain in this woman’s body!” [Laughs]. And of course, that’s the brilliance of the setup, because it produces this creature, Bella.
The studio cut a trailer and they cut out the reanimation part of it, because they didn’t want people to think it was a horror movie. And I thought the trailer made no sense without it, because it looked like she was just a sassy gal. Whereas the idea that she’s got this brain that learns quickly— that’s totally open, and that’s not conditioned by social convention—in a body that’s ready to do whatever it wants, is fantastic to me.
What did you think when you saw the finished film?
Well, there are a lot of sequences that I wasn’t involved in. I’d seen some of the sets, so I had an idea, and, of course, I’d read the script, but it was still fun to see. As always, it’s a little difficult, because you have a strong association with the shooting of the movie, but there were many elements that I wasn’t privy to, like the music, which is beautiful. It’s really ingenious, and it’s rich.
Emma’s performance is very surprising. She’s certainly game…
She’s fantastic. I always get uncomfortable when I talk about other actors, because, what else are you going to say? But truly she is. She’s not a diva. She’s obviously got lots of skill, but she’s very easy. If she suffers or she struggles, she doesn’t wear it. She keeps it private. She’s good humored, and she’s funny. We tease each other a lot. Teasing, taking the piss out of each other, was the order of the day. Yorgos too. The way he would direct me is he’d say, “Oh, you did a Willem.” [Laughs]. I’d be like, “Fuck you!”
There’s been a lot of debate around the film and the sexual frankness of it all—will it scare the Academy?
To be honest, I don’t get it. Obviously, my view is colored, although that’s not my part of the movie.
There’s not that much sex in it, and it’s not erotic, necessarily. Yes, it’s odd to see a top-drawer movie star get naked in a Hollywood production. That is slightly unusual, but most of it is comic and kind of frenetic, and it’s not really erotic. I think why people talk about the sex is because some the attitudes towards sex in the film are surprising. It’s not the actual sex scenes themselves. I mean, it’s fun to talk about, and it’s what people gravitate toward, because everybody’s either concerned or confused or depressed about sex. So, it’s a hot topic, but that’s not what the movie’s about. The movie’s about liberation and being free of a certain kind of conformity and a certain kind of deadening conditioning. And sex is a part of that, but I think the idea is scarier to people. It’s like men are threatened by it, and women are cheering it. Basically, it gets to the idea that women are sturdier characters when it comes to sex than men, and that’s pointed out in the relationship with [Mark Ruffalo’s character] Duncan.
Also, the fact that she’s game. She’s game, and we’re not used to that, because, at the center of some people’s moral conditioning is how frightening it is if a woman chooses her partners and chooses them freely. We have names for that, and we put them in a little box. All that’s in the air. So that’s why it feels hot and feels like sex.
But I think the reality of it is, it’s about something deeper. But I have noticed that sex sells, and people are interested in sex. There is sex, but it’s kind of goofy sex, and it’s more about the attitude towards sex, this kind of freeing thing. And we must be reminded that, while we cheer her on as she goes on her journey, this movie is not telling every young girl to go to Paris and become a prostitute to learn about who she is… ★