Triple player
Willem Dafoe’s ‘The Hunter’ gives actor hat trick: three movies out in one month
This may be the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac, but the month seems to belong to Willem Dafoe at the multiplex. The 56-year-old actor has three movies out since March 9, the latest of which, the Australian survival drama “The Hunter,” hits theaters this Friday.
That follows on the heels of Abel Ferrara’s indie “4:44 Last Day on Earth” and the big-budget sci-fi spectacle “John Carter.”
He has more than 70 films under his belt but Dafoe remains stunned by the strange trajectory of his career.
“[I think about it] all the time, all the time, all the time,” said Dafoe, discussing his work in a recent interview with the Daily News. “I’m not supposed to be here, certain forces happened, certain luck happened, certain willful things on my part and certain conditions, because if I did what most people did I’m in the wrong place. It wasn’t written on the wall, I didn’t follow a prescribed path.”
Actually, sometimes the path follows him.
Dafoe was recruited to star in “The Hunter” much the same way his character in the film is. On screen, he’s a mercenary hired by a shadowy representative of a biomedical company in an airport bar to hunt the last surviving Tasmanian tiger roaming the wilderness.
Off screen, Dafoe was approached in a New York City restaurant by director Daniel Nettheim, who needed a big Hollywood star to attract funding for his picture. Dafoe was sold on the emotional journey of the character — who bonds with a local family whose father has gone missing.
Then, like his character, Dafoe found himself headed to the Tasmanian wilderness, enduring blizzards on the top of Mount Wellington and learning how to read animal tracks from a survivalist.
“It was much more grueling that it looks on film,” says Dafoe. “I remember after the first time I saw the movie, I turned to Daniel and I said, ‘Where are the leeches? Where are the foul smells? Where’s all the wet, where’s the cold?’ ”
Just as physically intense was Dafoe’s turn as a 9-foot-tall, fourarmed Martian warrior on Disney’s “John Carter.”
Director Andrew Stanton told The News that he handpicked Dafoe, one of his favorite actors, for Tars Tarkas, his favorite character from the original Edgar Rice Burroughs story.
Dafoe found himself navigating the deserts of Utah on stilts and a motioncapture suit that looked more over-the-top than his Green Goblin costume from “Spider-man.”
The idea that some moviegoers think he just voiced the character gets him, well, animated.
“Of course, I’m unrecognizable in the end, but when I watch the movie, I see every impulse, because the animators honored the performance,” says Dafoe. “And I must say it kills me when someone watches the movie and thinks that it’s just voiced. That’s six months of walking around on stilts.”
So it may not come as a surprise that Dafoe signed on for his pal Ferrara’s “4:44 Last Day on Earth” and the chance to film a movie that allows him to sleep in his own New York City apartment. Dafoe has lived here since the late ’70s as a charter member of the Wooster Group and a fixture on the theater scene.
Until he left the group in 2005, he considered movie work as a way to fund his real passion — the stage — even as he was notching Oscar nominations for 1986’s “Platoon” and 2000’s “Shadow of the Vampire.”
It still surprises him that a kid from Appleton, Wis., could make it in the Big Apple.
“I could be this guy if my life was different,” says Dafoe, of his character Cisco in “4:44,” who spends the last day before the planet is destroyed obliterating every meaningful relationship he has.
“The loft, the art scene, New York, being downtown, the dealers, the temptation of drugs, the temptation of being clean ... I knew that world.”