Willem Dafoe Is Having a Legendary Year

“It was drop-dead New York days,” says Willem Dafoe. “It was dangerous. I lived off Tompkins Square Park. At night I would sit out on my fire escape and see people walk into the park with shotguns. I saw people get shot. I got robbed a couple of times. I was this square kid from the Midwest who wanted adventure! I was starting to learn about dangerous lives and poor people and Communism and revolution and punk rock. So I was good with that. I thought that was my way, if I wanted to be an artist.”

Forty years after his arrival in New York City, Willem Dafoe reclines on a brocaded, tasseled pillow in the lounge of the Chateau Marmont in late August, bathed in magic-hour Hollywood light, sipping fresh mint tea from a silver tea service. At this moment, he is about as far—geographically and aesthetically, if not quite spiritually—from mid-’70s New York as it is possible to get. Growing older has the common side effect of making us more cautious, less curious about the world. But at 62, Dafoe remains an open vessel. Since his early days in the downtown theater scene, the pursuit of adventure and a kid’s sense of play have always guided him, whether he’s appearing onstage with Marina Abramović in an experimental Robert Wilson opera, exploring grief via sadomasochism in a Lars von Trier film, or just bopping down the street of his adopted hometown. “One of my favorite things to do is to walk on the street in New York or in Rome,” he says. “You don’t know what’s going to happen to you. It’s such a parade of personalities and events. And of course I have to deal, not in a heavy way, with people coming up. For the most part, people are kind. But even apart from that, I like watching people. I find it exhilarating. I think I like people.” He laughs. “They’re so silly, and so great.”

Dafoe, who recently became a grandfather—he has a grown son with former partner Elizabeth LeCompte and is currently married to filmmaker Giada Colagrande—has a wiry, almost feline physicality, assisted by his 20-year daily practice of Ashtanga and a mostly vegan diet. His eyes are as bright as a baby’s. If you listen closely, his voice, that gravelly, self-described “New York honk,” still contains traces of midwestern nasal flatness. When he smiles or laughs, his face crinkles with glee or incredulity. Asked how he came to Ashtanga, a purist’s form of yoga, he has a ready answer: “I got old.” Then he pauses a moment to consider. “I always had this sense, ever since I was a child, that there was another world out there. Not that I was lied to, but that my view of the world was limited. And my view of the world was plenty to deal with, and plenty to make a life out of. But all of us, I think, we all feel a little hole. A kind of unsatisfactoriness, a hunger for something else.”

One solution has been to pour himself into his work. Dafoe has several film projects coming out in 2017, and their range—from Kenneth Branagh’s remake of Murder on the Orient Express to Death Note, a Netflix film based on the Japanese manga series of the same name, plus the dystopian sci-fi thriller What Happened to Monday—tells you something about how he stays creatively awake. Partly, he explains, each project is a response to the one that preceded it, but also, “when you work in different kinds of movies, you don’t get on anybody’s train,” he says. “Some people just do studio movies and that’s their world. Some people just do independent movies. It’s hard to do a mix. You can never plan. Sometimes you think, ‘Fuck, I just want to have some fun.’ And then you go off your fun and say, ‘No, I want something really hard.’”

The through line to his film work, though, is an attraction to strong directors (Martin Scorsese, Von Trier, Wes Anderson, David Cronenberg, Paul Schrader, Kathryn Bigelow, and Abel Ferrara among them), visionaries for whom he can, as he puts it, “be their creature. That frees me. I’m good at inhabiting things and I’m a good pretender, and in a structured environment I can let go of what stuff means. I can be the doer, they can be the watcher, and together we can make something.”

Dafoe is a two-time Academy Award nominee, for Platoon and Shadow of the Vampire, and as the awards-season machinery sputters back to life, there’s already preliminary industry chatter about a third. The Florida Project, Sean Baker’s follow-up to the 2015 Sundance hit Tangerine, trails a roving pack of children and their guardians living in a motel on the outskirts of Disney World. For the kids, the landscape is a candy-colored choose-your-own-adventure story of summertime friendship and small-time hustles, but for the grown-ups, economic and emotional realities encroach in increasingly brutal fashion. Starring alongside an ensemble of non-professional actors, Dafoe plays Bobby, the motel’s decent, beleaguered manager, and if you only know him as the Green Goblin in the Spider-Man movies or Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart, the subtlety of his performance may come as a shock. But, says Dafoe, “the joke is, people try to account for who you are and what you do, and the whispers on this are, We’ve never seen him like this before! And it’s a little bit like, Ay-yi-yi. That tells me more about the movies they watch than about me.” He shrugs.

Watching a famous actor play a working-class Joe can be an agony—the ego-electricity and intoxicating charisma that make a movie star aren’t forces that can always be tamped down or turned off, and sometimes the performances can feel phony or ridiculous, even offensive. But as Bobby, the film’s audience surrogate and one true adult, Dafoe the movie star is gone.

Professionally, Dafoe has always been comfortable disappearing inside of an eco-system, possibly because he was born into one ready-made. In a family of eight children raised by a Harvard-educated doctor father and a nurse mother, he arrived late in the birth order. “It was kind of a Beaver Cleaver family in the beginning. And by the time they got down to me—both of my parents worked really hard—the household was chaos. My sisters basically raised me,” he says. “And then the ’60s came, and all my brothers and sisters started coming home from University of Wisconsin-Madison totally radicalized. They were bringing home a political point of view and certain philosophies. My parents freaked out, and every holiday was a traumatic experience of little nieces coming home, saying, ‘Off the pigs!’ Long hair, beards, pregnancies. And I’m a kid, looking at that: ‘It’s confirmed,’ I thought, ‘there is another world out there.’”

Tomorrow, Dafoe heads off to his next adventure, shooting Aquaman, in which he’ll play Nuidis Vulko, and he’s just been tapped to star in At Eternity’s Gate, Julian Schnabel’s upcoming film about Van Gogh. Few could connect those dots without short-circuiting, but Dafoe can handle the quick change. He thrives on it. “Somewhere I’ve got a great ambition—it’s an unrealistic ambition, but it’s an ambition—to pass as a non-actor,” he says. “My interest in being an actor is not to deliver a dazzling performance. My interest is to disappear.”