Willem Dafoe got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January. It feels like he’s been trying to earn it ever since.
Dafoe appeared in six roles in four remarkable movies this year: Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu,” Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night,” Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” and Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Kinds of Kindness.”
Not that the 69-year-old actor in any way needs to prove himself. Dafoe has made more than 150 film and TV projects, landed four acting Oscar nominations (“Platoon,” “Shadow of the Vampire,” “The Florida Project,” “At Eternity’s Gate”) and should have gotten another for one of the half-dozen 2023 movies he was in (Lanthimos’ “Poor Things,” if you must ask).
Willem Dafoe reflects on his past roles, from ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ to ‘The Florida Project,’ enthusing about the wire work he did on ‘Spider-Man.’
Does he ever stop working? Long a mainstay of New York’s experimental Wooster Group theater company, Dafoe spends most of his time off in Rome with his filmmaker wife, Giada Colagrande. Time for other passions? Eggers, who also directed the actor in “The Northman” and “The Lighthouse,” believes so.
“Willem is a very deep person with many interests outside of acting and outside of himself, which unfortunately is not true of all actors,” Eggers says. “And he just loves to do.”
“That sounds good!” Dafoe says with an unmistakable raspy cackle over the phone. “The truth is, I may not be shooting all the time, but I always feel like I’m working. I’m either preparing things or checking things out, watching movies or reading. So I’m really a little obsessed with this making movies and theater game.”
Researching roles is how he expands his mind.
“That’s one of the pleasures of my profession,” he says. “It gives you an excuse to learn things that you might not know much about. And it helps root what you’re doing. When you learn things, you can apply the pretending in a different way.”
For “Nosferatu’s” Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, the actor brushed up on occult sciences — as they were understood in 1838. The remake of the silent horror classic pits Von Franz against Bill Skarsgård’s ghastly Count Orlok, the Dracula figure in this Germanic riff on Bram Stoker’s vampire tale.
“There’s a welcome sense of humor about it,” Dafoe says of his energized take. “Because he’s a little eccentric, he’s not quite seeing the world the same as the other characters are. It’s a relief from the heavy Victorian vibe.”
Though a “Nosferatu” veteran — he portrayed Orlok actor Max Schreck in “Shadow of the Vampire,” the 2000 film about the making of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece — Dafoe refrained from giving Skarsgård tips.
“He didn’t need any,” Dafoe laughs. “I would never give an actor advice. You get in trouble when you start putting your stuff on other people. Everybody’s got to find their own way.”
As real-life NBC executive Dave Tebet, Dafoe is literally the adult in “Saturday Night’s” room as chaos engulfs the young comedians pratfalling toward the sketch show’s 1975 first broadcast. Masking conflicting priorities with a gruff exterior, Tebet ultimately decides whether to throw the “live” switch at 11:30 or cut to a Johnny Carson rerun.
“There was a part of him that wanted them to succeed, another part of him was pragmatic and wanted to take care of his business, and a part didn’t want them to succeed,” Dafoe observes. “It’s interesting when a character has mixed objectives and they go back and forth, depending on the scene and who they’re talking to.”
“Saturday Night’s” long Steadicam takes — through a perfectly re-created Studio 8H, 2022 “SNL” host Dafoe attests — gave the stage veteran extra juice.
“You dance with the camera and the other actors,” he says. “When you have that double concentration, it really focuses you. It forces you to not lay back, becomes quite athletic. You don’t show, point, preen or strut, you do. That’s always the sweet spot.”
‘Saturday Night’ depicts the 90 minutes leading up to the very first episode of ‘SNL’ — but it takes some liberties with the truth. Here’s what’s fact and what’s fiction.
For Wolf Jackson, the dead tough-guy actor in the blockbuster “Beetlejuice” sequel, Dafoe referenced an amalgam of TV detectives and couldn’t resist going for “the Jack Lord hair.”
While definitely an auteur piece, Burton’s afterlife comedy operated at a level similar to the “Spider-Man” and “Aquaman” tentpoles the actor has appeared in.
“Big event movies are huge investments,” indie mainstay Dafoe acknowledges. “Your job is to elevate what you’re doing and not do it by the numbers. You have to find a personal reason for being there. It’s not just a question of being a good soldier; it’s to make the character live.”
In the three-part “Kinds of Kindness,” Dafoe plays a CEO who controls every aspect of his employees’ lives and a jealous sex guru who wants to bring the dead back to life. Vicarious fun to play such manipulative characters?
“Whether it’s manipulating or being manipulated, that’s [another] pleasure of my profession,” Dafoe says. “You get to take on different patterns, thinking and feelings in a safe way. Whether it’s a villain or someone that’s more heroic, it doesn’t really matter.
“There is something special about being able to do terrible things that you’re not going to get punished for,” he admits. “But it works the other way too. There’s a power in doing positive and beautiful things without necessarily getting the rewards of it. It can humble you and humanize you and, ironically, get you off yourself because you can poke holes into your conditioning.”
We think he’s earned that star.
