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 mustache. A vampire, a priest, and once, for an experimental- theater piece, a nun. A London banker and a Florida motel manager. T. S. Eliot and the Green Goblin.

MARC HOM

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 (December 21), as the Atlantean scientist Nuidis Vulko, and Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate (November 16), his 99th movie, 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 performer says over poached eggs and wheat toast at Morandi in Manhattan’s West Village, “sometimes I look at my life and think, How did I end up here?”

Coat and shirt by Prada; Trousers by Louis Vuitton; Shoes by Armando Cabral. MARC HOM

Born in Appleton, Wisconsin, Dafoe left the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 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 theater 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 L. A., 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 and disparate filmmakers, 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.

For Dafoe, Morandi is both convenient and sentimental. Its owner, Keith McNally, was once the proprietor of Lucky Strike, a downtown bistro around the corner from the Wooster Group Performing Garage. “Lucky Strike was like our kitchen,” Dafoe says. It’s hot—the humidity is pushing 90 percent and McNally’s zeal for European authenticity extends even to the au naturel air-conditioning—but Dafoe is perfectly at ease in an open navy cardigan over a T-shirt. He sips a green juice.

"I look at my life and think, how did I end up here?"

“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 offscreen, he is warm, well-mannered, and surprisingly attractive. Sitting across from him on a sunny June morning is a little like being in a haunted house with the lights on and suddenly noticing the elegant architecture. He moves with the earned poise of a dancer, a by-product 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.



Thirteen years ago, while filming The Life Aquatic 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. I love this city, but it’s only because it’s a place of entry and an international city that it still has any culture at all, because what really rules? You go down the West Side Highway and you see those buildings going up, and it’s like, who’s gonna live in these? What do they cost? What’s going on?

“New York is dear to me,” he says, “but it’s changed so much. For me, it’s a city of memories and ghosts.”

“We used to tell a joke when we were kids,” Dafoe has said. “You know what Houdini’s greatest escape was?” Punchline: Leaving his hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin. 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.



Shirt by Dries Van Noten. MARC HOM

His parents were rarely home and the household was “always chaos,” he says. “Basically, my sisters raised me. We never had family meals, except maybe on Sundays. My mother would cook a big something or other and just put it in the refrigerator, and you’d slice off something and eat it.” 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.”

Jacket, shirt, and trousers by Salvatore Ferragamo. MARC HOM

Still, the Protestant ethic was strong. “My father used to say, ‘You’ve gotta produce! You’ve gotta produce!’ ” Dafoe says. “All my life, soda pop was not allowed in the house. No alcohol. My parents were both teetotalers. Occasionally my mother would have a book club, and the most exotic thing in the world was they’d pull out a coffee urn. They didn’t drink coffee! We’d sneak down and load up whatever was left over with cream and sugar. It was like heroin!

“When my father came home and there was a problem [with one of us], he would take us to his study,” Dafoe says. “One of the few things we had of any value was a Flemish oil painting called The Happy Family, a home-and-hearth kind of thing. He’d put us in front of that, take off his belt, snap it a few times, and say, ‘You have a decision: Be a member of the happy family—or get this.’ We’d say, ‘I want to be a member of the happy family!’ ”

William died at age 97 in 2014, two years after Muriel. “On his deathbed—I could tell he wasn’t going to be around much longer, and 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.” (A portrait of Dafoe’s father as a financial executive, painted as a prop for the 2014 movie A Most Wanted Man, hangs in the actor’s home office.)

Dafoe’s seven siblings all went to the University of Wisconsin, then a hotbed of student protest. In 1970, a group of antiwar activists bombed the Army Mathematics Research Center, killing a 33-year-old physicist. “I’d be hitchhiking down to Madison when I was a teenager,” he says, “sleeping on their couches, smelling pot, having my sister Dee Dee explain her interpretation of the White Album to me.” Dee Dee took Dafoe to see a sketch-comedy revue called Kentucky Fried Theater, staged by some UW students who would go on to make Airplane! and The Naked Gun. “That really made me think, I could be doing this,” he says. “You don’t have to be a card-carrying industry person.” An even earlier influence was Sterling Holloway, best known as the voice of Winnie the Pooh, whose Disney LPs entranced Dafoe as a child. (“I wish I’d never listened to The Grasshopper and the Ants,” he says. That one “fucked me up.”)

"Envy is poison. I don't allow myself to have it."

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 nontraditional local company called Theatre X. Video from a 1975 production called Civil Commitment Hearings, featuring a long-haired, 20-year-old Dafoe reciting testimony from county-court transcripts, can be seen on YouTube.

“My parents were like, ‘When you really know what you want to do, we’ll help you,’ ” Dafoe says. “They put all my brothers and sisters through undergraduate and graduate school. Me, nothing, because they thought I was goofing around, but I was okay with that.” He worked part-time at a bindery and then a luncheonette counter. “I knew that if I really needed money, it would be a phone call away, but I kind of enjoyed the romance of living paycheck to paycheck.”

Trench coat by Burberry; Vest by Polo Ralph Lauren; Turtleneck sweater by Hermès; Trousers by Ralph Lauren; Loafers by Church’s; MARC HOM

While touring with Theatre X in Amsterdam, Dafoe met Richard Schechner, the founder of the Performance Group, who told him to come to New York. So he did. After a few months of couch surfing, Dafoe moved into an apartment on East Tenth Street. The rent was $225 a month, which he split with a roommate. “I was intending to have a commercial- theater 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 (“I was a terrible carpenter”) 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 theater 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 Markham comedy routines performed (by Dafoe, among others) in blackface. After a New York Times critic called the show racist, the New York State Council on the Arts cut the group’s funding. LeCompte appealed, unsuccessfully, and a number of prominent artists wrote letters in support. (Would they do so today? one wonders.) “Some people felt discomfort when they watched the performance and thought, Should they be doing this?” Dafoe now says. “That’s an interesting place for an audience to be.” A 1984 piece called L. S. D. (. . . Just the High Points. . .) juxtaposed an interview with Timothy Leary’s onetime babysitter and a sped-up rendition of The Crucible, prompting a cease-and-desist letter from Arthur Miller’s attorney.

"That’s a comfort zone most actors don’t like to get out of. Willem is fearless.”

“If you want to understand Willem, you really do have to understand his interest in experimental theater,” says Paul Schrader, who cast Dafoe as a drug dealer to the rich in the 1992 film Light Sleeper, the first 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 theater 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.”

Wes Anderson, who has worked with Dafoe three times, most recently on The Grand Budapest Hotel, says, “He is a performer of much broader definition than actor might normally suggest. I saw him dance with Baryshnikov at the Théâtre de la Ville. I also saw him in Richard Foreman’s Idiot Savant at the Public in New York, which for me is almost more of a moving, living sculpture than a play. I have always loved working with Willem because he has all the tools and skills and experience and clarity and confidence you could ask for. But he is also up for virtually anything.” Anderson calls Dafoe “one of my favorite actors anywhere.”

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, whose posthumously published diaries express envy toward his loftmate’s early success in Hollywood (“Difficult adjustment to Willem and the movies—some jealousy”), later became famous as a solo performer 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,” he says. “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.”

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 artistically freewheeling interregnum known as New Hollywood to an end. “Auteur became a dirty word in America,” says Dafoe, who later narrated a documentary about the flop. “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.”

Jacket by Dried Van Noten; Trousers by Ralph Lauren; Boots by Haider Ackermann; Prada t-shirt, Dafoe’s own. MARC HOM

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. If he’s off in Rome with Abel Ferrara, the next stop is going to be for Disney.” Schrader is referring to Ferrara’s Siberia, a dream story inspired by Carl Jung’s The Red Book, and Togo, a Disney movie about a dogsled driver, both of which will star Dafoe.

In 2002, the same year that he played a sex-addicted audiovisual salesman in Schrader’s underrated 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?’ When you look back on that, it’s pretty funny.” Reports conflict, but Nicolas Cage, John Malkovich, John Travolta, Jason Isaacs, Bill Paxton, Billy Crudup, and Robert De Niro are all said to have been offered the role before Dafoe.

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 $100 million 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 outearned all of Star Wars and James Bond combined. This past summer’s Avengers: Infinity War makes Spider-Man look like Adam West–era Batman. “They’re getting bigger, bigger, bigger,” says Dafoe, who spent five months in Australia last year filming James Wan’s Aquaman.

Aquaman has always been a small-s kind of superhero. He could breathe underwater, speak dolphin, and ride giant sea turtles, but that was about it. In Wan’s version, he’s a tattooed, bearded man-god with a cool eyebrow scar. “A lot is on Jason Momoa’s shoulders,” Dafoe says of the movie’s lead. “But a lot will depend on the world, which is quite spectacular.”

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.” Plus, he says, “I like doing physical stuff.”

Still, he has misgivings about the ascendant franchise model of moviemaking. “It’s really scary,” he says. “We aren’t that far from an age where there’s ten people sitting around a room deciding what people want. Because they have the numbers.”

Many actors say they do “one for them, one for me,” which in practice typically means one for the paycheck, 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. Some are not available on the major streaming services. Yet he continues to take his chances in the “Wild West world” of independent film when he could just stick with studio-backed Oscar hopefuls. 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.”

Jacket, shirt, trousers, and tie by Tom Ford. MARC HOM

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.”

We’re sitting on a bench in Abingdon Square Park in the West Village one week later. (“What do I do, take you to the High Line? Take you to the Whitney? A cool restaurant?”) “I like this, actually,” Dafoe, now in a T-shirt and khakis, says convincingly of the continuing heat wave. “It slows everybody down. We’re like a bunch of birds at an oasis.”

At Eternity’s Gate, which was selected for the Venice and New York film festivals, is being mixed at a postproduction facility nearby. The film, Schnabel’s sixth, takes place during the last two years of van Gogh’s life, up to his death, at age 37, by suicide. According to Dafoe, “It’s not a forensic biopic.”

Initially, 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 on West 14th Street, another Keith McNally co-venture, when Schnabel was a rising star of the “go-go” 1980s art market, represented by the Mary Boone Gallery in SoHo. 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.” Next to the few surviving photographs, Dafoe appears visibly older. But he bears a striking resemblance to the painter’s expressive self-portraits. “I never thought of using another actor,” Schnabel says. “There’s nobody else who could have done what he did.”

"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.”

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 he’s a strong personality, and 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 talks about ‘making marks.’ Painting is an accumulation of marks, each in relation to the other. He also says there’s no mistakes in painting. You go avanti. You go forward.”

It’s July, and Dafoe has already wrapped two movies since January: Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn, from the novel by Jonathan Lethem, and The Lighthouse, the second feature from Robert Eggers, the director of The Witch. Next week, he’ll fly to Puerto Rico to finish Dee Rees’s adaptation of Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted.

Dafoe doesn’t like to watch movies while on location. “It kind of disturbs my imagination,” he says, “which sounds precious, but you just don’t want to have the noise in your head. You don’t even want the noise of your own life. I love it when you go somewhere and you don’t have any friends, you don’t have your usual places, you don’t have your common references. It allows you to jump in and have another life.” 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 3:00 a.m.,” Dafoe says. “Maybe I’ll try to do it at lunch if there’s a very long setup, 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 really am the product of a certain time,” he says. “They’re very practical. Not even reflective. Just reporting as an exercise to learn how to express myself. I also write down jokes, phone numbers, reminders, things I heard, things I saw.” He mentions that Robby Müller, the cinematographer on To Live and Die in L. A., died two days earlier. “I write that down.

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“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.) A few are speckled composition notebooks; others are hardbound in leather. It’s clear, paging through them, that these volumes will never form the basis of a memoir. Most are almost completely unreadable. “They were in a place that was watertight,” he says, “but just the change in temperature affected the ink.” Dafoe’s dense, slanted handwriting now bleeds through the paper, one set of lines layering over another like cross-hatching. The text is interrupted here and there by a drawing or a pasted-in memento: newspaper clippings, foreign banknotes, naughty Polaroids.

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 colored by a film I’m doing,” Dafoe says, flipping through one notebook. He stops and reads a quotation from T. S. 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.”

This article appears in Esquire's Fall + Winter '18 Big Black Book.