Willem Dafoe Becomes the Creature

Willem Dafoe is talking about TikTok. He doesn’t have an account, or any social media for that matter. “I try not to do it because it connects you to stuff that you shouldn’t really worry about,” he says — but he is all over Gen Z’s app of choice nonetheless. There is a barrage of clips of him set to sultry R&B which range from thirsty to seventh-day-in-the-Sahara parched: shirtless and smoking a cigarette on the set of Platoon, shirtless and strapped to a metal contraption in Spider-Man, that kind of thing. On the app, he’s not referred to by his real name so much. It’s more something like “Willem Dripfoe” or “Willem Da Goat.” At this Dafoe lights up as only Dafoe can: mouth widening seemingly beyond the borders set by his cheeks, lips curling to display his trademark gappy smile, eyes popping like fireworks. It’s warm, yet only one notch away from sinister.  Does he know what “goat” means? “Yeah, I do, yeah.”

The most popular video of him on TikTok (741k likes and counting) sees the 66-year-old performing an impromptu fit check on the streets of New York. It was filmed in December last year and went viral shortly thereafter. A fashion vlogger approaches him and asks him what he’s wearing and he rattles off brands, examining each article carefully for a label as he does so. Jeans? “Frame.” Sweater? “Maybe Prada, I don’t know.” He bought his shoes in Mexico. He doesn’t know where his beanie hat is from. “I wasn’t wearing anything special,” Dafoe says, staring on Zoom through black chunky-framed reading glasses, a little bemused by the attention the clip has garnered. It’s a Friday afternoon in early January. He’s in his house on the outskirts of Rome wearing a dark grey hoodie, unzipped, and a black T-shirt. “It was, you know, a nice little social encounter.” 

That video’s popularity is indicative of something that anyone who has come within spitting distance of a cinema in the past 12 months already knows: it is Willem Dafoe drip season. In 2021 alone, he appeared in new films from Wes Anderson, Zack Snyder and Paul Schrader. And then there was Spider-Man: No Way Home. In the latest offering from the Marvel machine, Dafoe resurrects his role of the Green Goblin from 2002’s Spider-Man alongside a bunch of other ghosts of Spider-Mans past. A month and change on from its release, it is now officially the eighth highest-grossing film of all time – in a pandemic, no less. Dafoe has been widely praised as the film’s MVP for putting in the kind of barnstorming performance he’s become known for over the past 40 years. “It was a continuation of what I had done a long time ago, and I liked the people, they’re real believers in what they’re doing.” He reserves special praise for Spider-Man 3.0 Tom Holland. “I admire greatly his discipline and his commitment to the role. And physically, he was incredible.”

It’s clear that Dafoe cares deeply about his work, to a borderline obsessive degree. It doesn’t matter if it’s Aquaman or Antichrist, he’s giving it everything either way. As he has got older, he says he has become more and more focused on finding meaning in it. “I don’t mean to get heavy here. But I don’t wake up a day without thinking, ‘what am I doing here?’. You’ve got to find out what you like to do, and not even what you’re good at, but what you feel engaged in, and pursue that.”

When he was first approached about reprising his role in No Way Home, he told producer Amy Pascal and director Jon Watts that he wouldn’t do it if it was just going to be a cameo. He wanted something meaty—he wanted to meaningfully continue the work he started two decades prior. “It’s fun to do the action sequences, it’s fun to have resources,” he says. “I make a lot of budget-challenged movies. So it’s nice to have all the technical stuff to work with.” He insisted on doing his own stunts because he loves how stripped down and simple the process is. “It’s really fun to do those things because they’re pure. They’re pure because what you’re doing is what you’re doing. And your heart and mind follow.” 

Does he particularly enjoy playing villains? “I don’t know what that is,” he says, smirking now. “I’ll play dumb. You play characters. I could say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s fun to play villains ’cause you can do things that you can’t do in life, or it’s fun to play with your dark side’. But I don’t know. I’m not thinking about those things.” And yet, he has dreamed up an idea for a film that would see him playing arguably the most iconic villain in cinema history: the Joker. 

For years, people have been telling him he’s the perfect man for the role, and it got him thinking. “There is something interesting about, like, if there was a Joker imposter. So it would be possible to have not duelling Jokers but someone that says to be the Joker that isn’t the Joker. And that kind of opens up the possibility of an interesting story, particularly if you had Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, and then you had someone who was either imitating or riffing off what he did. I fantasised about that. But other than that I am not talking to anybody [about it], you’re the first one.” 

Dafoe wouldn’t necessarily say he’s “into” fashion, but he certainly knows what he likes. “My go-to people have always been Prada, because there’s something classic [about the clothes] and I just like how I feel in them and they’re beautifully made.” He sees getting styled in designer clothes for photoshoots as just another form of acting. “It’s kind of what happens in approaching a character except it’s condensed, it’s very immediate.” He talks about a shoot for a different magazine which went awry. “The clothes were so terrible, I said ‘I can’t do any of this.’” He looked around the room and saw a collection of people—the stylist, the photographer, the makeup artist—each with their own very distinct personal style, “and I said, let me wear all of your clothes. And they let me do it. So they took off their clothes, I put them on and those were the clothes for the shoot.”

He sometimes fantasizes about having a uniform—a Bart Simpson wardrobe, if you will. “When I was young, I heard about Ingmar Bergman having a closet full of black turtleneck sweaters. I thought, yeah, maybe that’s the way to go. So you don’t spill some of your creative juice.” Throughout the conversation, he offers ruminations such as this which hint at the degree to which creativity—and his work—defines how he lives his life. Later on, I ask if he has any hobbies. “Work is my hobby,” he says, followed by a slow, gravelly chuckle. He seems to be joking, but then he doesn’t really answer the question. “I’m always preparing something, I’m always studying for things.” As it stands, he’s got five projects in the works, due to be released in the next two years. He says that the pandemic has been a difficult time because he’s been working pretty much non-stop, and Covid restrictions, quarantines and closed sets have meant that he hasn’t been with his family as much as he’d have liked. “It’s been rough because in order to make these movies, I’ve been in quarantine a lot, alone a lot. Outside of the set, there’s no life.”  

Dafoe cut his teeth as an actor in mid-1970s New York, after moving from Wisconsin at 21. “New York was in a terrible shape,” he says. “It was a violent city, it was a corrupt city, but for a young man, it was a very exciting place to be.” He fell in with an artsy crowd and started performing avant-garde theatre with a troupe called The Wooster Group. He was, he says, “transformed” by those early years, putting on impromptu performances that emphasised physicality. “I just felt very turned on and got introduced to the desire to be an artist of some sort. And that really formed me.” The most important thing he learned during that time was, “to approach things through action, through doing, through task-oriented performance, not so much as an interpreter, not so much as an emotive being that is there to guide the audience along on the trip, but to have an experience.”

When Dafoe talks about his acting process, he uses the word “contact” a lot. It’s typically about the tactility of a fight scene, or a closeness to the process and to the material. But sometimes it’s more literal. When he was filming The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’ psycho-comedy-drama about two stranded lighthouse keepers, he enjoyed the grim shoot during an actual storm in arse-end-of-nowhere Nova Scotia. “It wasn’t pleasant, but it was enjoyable. You’re living an experience. There are certain things that you can’t imitate, you know, the redness of the skin, when you’re out in brutal weather, the way you feel towards a warm stove when you’re freezing all day.” 

He says that he likes to “become a creature” for the directors he works with. This involves eschewing ego and giving himself over to their vision to become “an animal in the landscape.” “I like the fact that someone needs you to do something for them,” he says. “And that frees you from a kind of delusion and a certain kind of self-centred view. But if you have a good rapport with that person, and they put you in a situation that pushes you, you’re going to learn something.”

No Way Home director Jon Watts gets it. “He had already created the [Green Goblin] character with Sam [Raimi], so I knew the crazy places he was willing to go. But seeing it actually happen two feet away from you? I once shot a project with two wolves in a tiny New York apartment. There were moments where it felt like that.”

Do outside elements impacting these shoots wind up making these projects feel more real? “​​Real is a funny word, because I’ve done things that are very artificial, that I really enjoy. It’s about the contact.” There it is again. He’s not speaking directly about No Way Home, but he might as well be. “It’s about the world falling away, and making something that speaks for itself, and doesn’t point to something else.” 

While it’s clear he has a lot of love for the blockbusters he has been a part of, you get the impression that it’s the grittier work that truly satisfies him. Take, for example, Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which was filmed across 58 days in the dry heat of a Moroccan desert in 1987. “When I was done, I felt used up. And that’s a nice feeling. It’s nice when you do what you need to do, not what you want to do. Because that sustains you.” 

2022 is set to be another peak Dafoe year. This month, he plays a mustachioed carnival barker in Guillermo Del Toro’s noir thriller Nightmare Alley alongside Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett. Then, in April, he reteams with Eggers for The Northman, a Gladiator-esque revenge tale, set in Iceland subbing out Romans and Joaquin Phoenix for Vikings and Björk. He is in the Oscars conversation for several roles, with No Way Home representing perhaps his best shot at taking home a statue since 2017’s The Florida Project (he has been nominated four times, but never won). He pays attention to the chatter, he says, because it ends up having a major impact on how widely a movie is shared. “I value that a great deal, not only for me, but it helps the work get seen and gives you a little possibility to compete with the publicity machines and money of bigger movies.” But what would an Oscar win mean to him personally, after all this time? “I’ll tell you if it ever happens,” he says, poker-faced. “You can call me afterwards and I’ll tell you, because that’s too hypothetical.”

Still, awards aren’t everything. Especially if he’s still deriving the same amount of pleasure from his work as he did 100-odd films ago. He is, right? “Probably more,” he says. “Because I think I worry less. And I enjoy more.”

This story originally ran on British GQ with the title “The joy and the grit of Willem Dafoe’s drip season”