Willem Dafoe, the chameleon with the most un-disguisable face in the room

The thing the camera keeps doing to Willem Dafoe is the thing he has spent his life refusing to let it do. It looks at the asymmetry — the long jaw, the eyes set wide and watchful, the smile that arrives a half-beat after the line — and it decides, instantly, that this man must be a villain, or a saint, or some hybrid of the two that requires a special category. He has spent forty years pushing back against that decision. Every job, in his telling, is a job: a contract, a building, a company, a rehearsal. He is not a star. He is a worker. The face does the publicity; the discipline does the work. That argument, repeated long enough to become a vocation, is the actual subject of the career.

He grew up the seventh of eight children in Appleton, Wisconsin, raised mostly by five older sisters while his surgeon father and nurse mother worked at the hospital. The Dutch nickname — Willem instead of William — stuck in high school and outlived the original. He went to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee for drama and left after eighteen months, joined the experimental troupe Theatre X, moved to New York with the cohort, and apprenticed in the company that mattered: Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, then the splinter that renamed itself The Wooster Group. Co-founded with director Elizabeth LeCompte and the late Spalding Gray, Wooster became, and remains, his artistic home. Most of what looks like idiosyncrasy in his film performances — the lean physicality, the comfort with stylised speech, the refusal to soften — was built downstairs at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street, in front of audiences who came for hours of fractured, repeating, structurally violent theatre.

The film career is, by his own account, the way he funds the theatre work. It still added up to one of the great character-actor filmographies of the late twentieth century. He was Sergeant Elias dying with his arms in the air in Platoon, which earned him his first Academy Award nomination. He was the doubting, terrified, ferociously human Jesus of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, the film that drew the loudest protests of his career and the one he has defended most stubbornly since. He was the FBI agent in Mississippi Burning, the broken priest in Light Sleeper, Bobby Peru’s gold-toothed grin in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. The 1990s gave him a journeyman’s run — eXistenZ, Affliction, The English Patient — and the 2000s the catalogue role: Max Schreck as an actual vampire in E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire, a second Oscar nomination, and the line between Method and joke walked with terrible precision.

The standard reading of his career flattens all of this into a list of grotesques — the Green Goblin, Antichrist’s grieving therapist, Bobby Peru — and treats him as the industry’s specialist in transgression. That reading misses the part that came from the company. Dafoe is, when you watch closely, an exact actor rather than an extreme one. He is interested in worker characters: a father, a soldier, a thief, a motel manager, a Dutch painter at the end of his money. The Florida Project, in which he plays the manager of a low-rent motel near Disney World, earned him his third Oscar nomination because the performance is built out of small bureaucratic acts of mercy, not big choices. The same year, at the Berlinale, he collected an honorary Golden Bear for a career that has, all along, been about that kind of attention.

The late phase is the busy one. Julian Schnabel cast him as Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate, which won him the Volpi Cup at Venice and a fourth Oscar nomination. Robert Eggers made him the chief of a doomed lighthouse keeping in a black-and-white chamber piece, then a Renaissance jester, then the Van Helsing analogue in Nosferatu, the third entry in what has become Eggers’ Dafoe trilogy. Yorgos Lanthimos handed him Dr. Godwin Baxter in Poor Things, a Frankenstein-as-tender-father grotesque that read as the actor finally being given a role designed entirely around his face. Tim Burton brought him back into the franchise frame for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. He shot Sean Baker, Wes Anderson, Abel Ferrara and Paul Schrader’s regulars on rotation. At the same time he agreed to a two-year mandate as Artistic Director of the Theatre Department at La Biennale di Venezia, which is the institutional version of his old argument — that the theatre is the apprenticeship, the company, the place where the work is built.

What is next reads, on paper, like a CV designed to embarrass actors half his age. There is Late Fame, opposite Greta Lee, headed for theatres this year. There is The Birthday Party, finally getting a North American release after Locarno. There is Time Out, the Scott Cooper picture for Netflix in which he co-stars with Adam Sandler. There is a return to Robert Eggers for Werwulf, the gothic werewolf horror Focus Features is releasing on Christmas Day; Dafoe joins Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Lily-Rose Depp in 13th-century England. The trick, at seventy, is to keep working the way he worked at thirty: as a member of a company, on someone else’s stage, in the service of a building he did not design. He has been arguing for the dignity of that position for forty years. The argument has not gotten old. Neither, against the evidence of the face, has he.

Tags: actors, Nosferatu, Platoon, Poor Things, Robert Eggers, The Florida Project, wes anderson, Willem Dafoe