Vanity Fair: What was a perfect moment in your career?
Willem Dafoe: You try not to have favorites, but Last Temptation of Christ was a wonderful project. A lot was demanded of me, and I work best when a lot is demanded of me. I got a call that Martin Scorsese wanted to talk to me. I was shocked initially. I said, “What role?” And my agent said, “You idiot—Jesus.” But then I saw the script, and it’s an examination of his human side, the guy-on-the-street Jesus. And I thought, I can do that. That’s interesting. I go to meet him, and in about two minutes he says, “You want to do it?”
There was no audition?
No. It was almost like, “Look at Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew, and I’ll see you in Morocco.”
How do you generally like to prepare for roles?
It depends on the role, but the one consistent thing is that I need to feel like I’m that guy—that I have the confidence and the authority to inhabit that character. And usually it comes not from traditional research like backstory, but from learning something. In Platoon, I knew how to clean that rifle. I knew how to move in the jungle.
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I assume you didn’t expect all this when you were growing up.
I’m a kid from Appleton, Wisconsin, that gets to travel, and learn things, and make pretend and have all these adventures. It’s like, did I ever think I would be dancing with Baryshnikov?
So you’ve had many perfect moments.
There’s lots, you know? Every time I disappear into the action. Every time I lose myself in a different way of thinking—that’s a gift, because that’s all I want. I want to, you know, melt into what is.
What do you want to do that you haven’t done?
I don’t know. [laughs]. Every time I approach something I really feel like it’s fresh for me. That place of not knowing—of curiosity, or fear—becomes normal. So then you invite it. You shake hands with the devil you know, and that devil is your friend because he’s going to take you places that you couldn’t even imagine. You know this phrase “nailing it”?
Sure.
It’s the most ridiculous phrase in the world. I get what it means. But there’s no such thing. There’s no arriving, there’s only going toward something.
I’ve asked other actors this, and I’m curious what your take is. What are the commonalities you see in the way that actors’ brains work?
They’re so different, but there’s a lot of military brats and a lot of people with religious backgrounds, which is a curious thing.
Let’s talk about each of those categories.
With military brats, I think it’s about identity. They get moved around to different schools, so they have to be different people. I think they find, usually, a social mask and have to adapt. And the religious stuff is just, basically, if acting is exercising empathy—and, at its highest level, it’s some sort of service to a communal ritual—that’s very close to some sort of communion like you get with a religious community.
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One thing seems to be that many actors want attention, but then they’re uncomfortable with attention.
I think that’s true: Look at me—don’t look at me. That look at me is to get energy, to get the light on me, to not just feel verification but to snap you out of your sleep. At the same time, it’s very superficial.
I’ve always assumed that when some actors start to get a lot of love and praise, it just reminds them of what they think is at fault in themselves.
Ah, that’s pretty good. Yeah, I’m down with that a little bit. This thing that I talk about a lot—I talk about too much, but it’s really true—is this feeling of disappearing, that thing of [wanting] to be lost in the action. It’s in the Van Gogh film I did. He says, “When I’m painting, I don’t think.”
