Why acclaimed actor Willem Dafoe wears so many faces: "I really am in it for the adventure"

For an actor who's appeared in blockbuster franchises and earned decades of critical acclaim (He just earned his fourth Golden Globe nomination), Willem Dafoe remains something of an industry anomaly. He's starred in controversial features like "The Last Temptation of Christ" and "Antichrist;" he's been an animated fish in "Finding Nemo," a motel manager in "The Florida Project" and Vincent Van Gogh in "At Eternity's Gate." And now, in "Poor Things" – Yorgos Lanthimos' follow-up to "The Favourite" – he's an inquisitive Victorian physician whose young charge, Bella (Emma Stone), is also his latest experiment.

"Performing is still kind of mysterious to me," Dafoe told me during a recent "Salon Talks" interview, "and I never tire of it. It's always different." During our conversation, Dafoe reflected on how he's managed to avoid being typecast after all this time, why he's not interested in going behind the camera, the movies his fans most want to talk to him about and his unique trajectory. "I don't have this master plan or I don't have specific career aspirations," he said. "I've just kind of bumped along and gone from project to project, and always looking for good people, and doing stuff that turned me on."

You can watch my full interview with Dafoe here, or read the transcript of our conversation below.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Talk to me about this movie and your unique, Dr. Frankenstein-like character.

You meet me in my house. It's a Victorian period. I'm a scientist, I'm a doctor, and I'm scarred. We find out later that my father has experimented on me. He was also a scientist, a doctor. I deal in cadavers and such things for my work. I received this cadaver, and there's a child. This woman is pregnant. She's suicided, and I think this is a great opportunity, being a man of science, "Why don't I put the baby's brain in this woman's body?" That's where we start, basically.

The accent you do is more Scottish.

Yes. That choice comes from the novel. I think he's written as Scottish, and the writer is Scottish. I think he puts a lot of himself in this character called Godwin Baxter, and sometimes she [Bella] calls him “God.” He's her creator. For a long time he holds onto her. He falls in love with her. It's a paternal kind of relationship, but it's more than that. Then he realizes he has to let her go at some point, out into the world.

The setup provides you with this woman that's, in her body, a grown woman. She's got this brain that learns very quick and it's not conditioned by social conventions. She goes out in the world and kind of is a truth-teller, and is an innocent because she hasn't experienced the world. She's also very wise because she doesn't have all these accepted truths that are not true. That's the fun of the movie, because you see her poke holes in all these things that we take as accepted truths and just accept in terms of our identity, in terms of our conformity. We see ourselves in that. It's nice to follow her through this journey where she's really realizing herself.

You work with directors who work so far outside the box, who really are pushing convention and doing really interesting things. Was it the book that drew you to it? Was it the director? Was it the story? Was it the cast?

I've always liked his [Yorgos Lanthimos'] movies, and it was simple; they came to me. Emma was involved very early in this project – Yorgos invited her into it very early, – so she has a big hand in the project. They called me up and they basically told me what the story is. Both of them I like a great deal, and I liked the general pitch they gave me. So I said, "I'm in."

I read recently from Variety that Mark Ruffalo said that during the making of the film, he was very concerned that he might be replaced by another actor, and you fed right into that. What did you do, Willem? 

Listen, Mark is sweet. He also performs his insecurity sometimes. It's kind of half real and half fake, half to get reassurance and half just kind of self-deprecating humor. So this goes on, and I think, "We've got to put a stop to this." He kept on saying, "I saw Oscar Isaac around here. He could do my role." He plays this insecurity, which is all part of his character in the end, but I mean personally plays it. So one day I brought Oscar in, and Oscar made it as if he was called in to replace him, to give him a little fright. It's a nasty little prank, but we're still friends.

This film in some ways hearkens visually back to some classic horror films, to "Frankenstein," to "Metropolis." When you were growing up, what movies were you were watching and saying, "I want to do something like that"?

When I was a kid, I was more fixated on the theater. I wasn't the guy that was in the house watching movies. But I grew up in the Midwest. My parents had eight kids, and they both were workaholics, and occasionally they'd go to Chicago, the big city, and have a romantic weekend. When they were there they'd buy these little 8 mm films that were shorts from features like “Frankenstein” and all these horror movies, and I used to play them obsessively. So those were really the first movies I saw.

We had a little projector, and I used to play them and play them backwards. Those were probably the first movies I saw. Maybe that's in there somewhere, but I was a cinephile much more later in life and much more attracted to film later. My identity was really as a theater director for many years.

As one of the founding members of the Wooster Group, you are so rooted in that identity and that part of theater history. Then when I look at your film career, you have directors who you've worked with again and again, and again like Wes Anderson, like Abel Ferrara, like Lars von Trier. That to me speaks to someone who understands repertory.

Yes. First of all, it's obvious. You have a shorthand. If you have a good time working with them, there's trust there. They know you. You know them. You can serve them better. They can set you up better. Also there's something beautiful, and this does come from the theater very much, of being part of the fabric of a whole body of work, and to see these different characters go through the different films. There's a pleasure to that. I think there's a pleasure for the audience and there's a pleasure for the actor. You get an extra spin on it because sometimes you can use them iconographically because you can position them in relationship to previous films.

I think of the work you've done in Wes Anderson films, for example.

Yeah. You're playing with an image, which I don't normally do. But in the context of a body of work, it's fun to do that.

As someone who comes from that theater background who has that repertory experience, who likes that dynamic, it's interesting to me that you rarely seem to be interested in going behind the camera. Is that something that's still on your bucket list of things to do, or are you you in your lane, you like where you are?

No, I'm in my lane. Performing is still kind of mysterious to me, and I never tire of it. It's always different. I don't want that kind of responsibility. I try to think what turns me on, and it's usually attaching myself to someone who has a vision. And then my job, my pleasure, is trying to embody that vision. It's not necessarily mine, but I come to it. Part of my work is trying to make flesh what they're describing to me, or once they've made a world to inhabit that world. I think that's for me, that's the way I get the most pleasure and I'm the most engaged.

When I have an idea and I want to express it, it often completes itself in a funny way. I don't want to say it's self-serving, but I'm not into interpreting something that I know and crafting something to tell people that is my experience. I want to have the experience, and I want to have the experience and have it be hopefully honest enough and full enough that people can have it with me by watching me. In that way, I don't worry so much about what it means or where we're going. So much of performing, it's about commitment, and being present, and receiving what's around you. I look at you now — it's about being receptive, and also being flexible and tolerant, and all those things can only happen if you make a trick: You sort of do it for someone else, because if you do it for yourself, I think you rush to result and you're also less free.

So I hope it doesn't sound like I'm flattering myself by saying, "Well, I do it for the other people. I don't do it for myself," because that's not it. Ultimately, I do it for myself because that's how I function best. When you say, "Walk across the room," and I do it, and I find pleasure in that action. I find my way to that. If I say, "What do I do now?" it's a different process, "Oh, maybe I'll walk across the room." I immediately start to craft something and I'm not thrown into the not knowing like you would be when you do it for someone else.

The way that you do it though, Willem, the characters that you inhabit, you have played detectives, and monsters, and a fish. How do you avoid being typecast? You could be monsters forever.

Look, I've tried not to be typecast because I just like to have different challenges. I don't like to sell anything. Some people do it beautifully, they create a persona and then they create stories that they can go deeper and they can express that persona. It's one way of making something. But I like to try to bend myself to the situation because I really am in it for the adventure, in it for the experience. I'm a little bit like a child that way, but what makes me not a child is I'm serious about it and I'm very disciplined. The act of trying to give yourself to the bigger picture is a very adult thing. And that's what's going to sustain you.

Because I try very just naturally to mix up different projects, different sizes of projects, working with new directors, working with directors that have been around for a while, your films get seen differently, how they get distributed. Some movies I've made are very underseen. Some movies I've made are seen widely. So you are always developing and being seen in different ways so you don't get something reflected back to you that puts you in one lane. So hopefully, at least in theory, you are setting yourself up to be seen in different ways and then different opportunities come.

What's a movie that you've done that you wish more people had seen?

Oh, there's many. There's many. Maybe I'm a crybaby, but you make a movie and you like it, you feel like it's not seen enough. I make a lot of small movies because I like the small team. I like the flexibility. Sometimes the people with the most radical visions and most interesting ways of working aren't seen as commercially viable, so they're working with smaller budgets, quicker shoots, that kind of thing. Those movies, sometimes.

I've worked with Abel Ferrara, for example. I know people that say, "Oh, Abel Ferrara, 'Bad Lieutenant.'" That's a beautiful film, or it's an interesting film. It is an important film. But he's done so much work since then, and some I've been involved in. And because of distribution, he lives in Europe now and he's quite well regarded in Europe, but here I find constantly that those films are under-distributed.

You also live at least part of the time in Europe. Angelina Jolie did an interview earlier this week where she said she doesn't want to be in Hollywood anymore because Hollywood is an unhealthy place. Having that space away from Hollywood at least part of the time in your life, how does that change your perspective to the work that you seek out and the work that you do?

I've never been like a Hollywood guy, but I've never not been a Hollywood guy. I've lived there while I've been working on movies. I've never lived there, because for many years I was working with the theater company downtown called the Wooster Group, for 27 years. Now that's 20 years ago now.

I belonged to the community of each individual film, and of course I'm a part of that film community because I've been working for a little while. But I understand what she says about being unhealthy, but she was in the belly of the beast a lot of the time. Now she's branching out and directing more. I imagine it's liberating for her to be out of that lane, as you say, that she's been put in a very prominent way. I don't have that same kind of problem. I don't have the kind of celebrity she has, and I've never lived in L.A. So socially, the environment that I'm in is different.

I've always traveled a lot because even with the Wooster Group, we used to sometimes tour four or five months a year. So ever since I've been about 22 years old, I've spent a lot of the year outside of the United States. I love it when I'm here, but I also love to travel, and I go where the work is.

You've been in so many cult films, movies that people hold so close to their hearts that maybe weren't big when they first came out. I want to know when people come up to you and they're starstruck, what is it? Is it “Boondock Saints”? Is it “American Psycho”? What is it?

It depends on the person, obviously. Like “Boondock Saints,” for a certain, particularly male, of a certain age, that was probably a teenager or a young man maybe. If they were of age, let's say a little after that because it had no release, but it became a cult movie. Those are “Boondock Saints" fans.  But out of that demographic, I don't think people are that aware of the movie, so it's very particular.

Sometimes I say when people come up to me and they want to talk about a movie, I can sometimes tell what part of my filmography they're familiar with and probably what part of my filmography they don't know it all, which is cool. Maybe it's a thing of vanity or something, but I like the fact that I have different audiences.

I always felt like this with the theater, that the theater people didn't know about my film career and the film people didn't know about my theater career, if you call it a career. That does a thing where that keeps you flexible because then you don't, getting back to doing different kinds of work and all that, you don't see yourself as one thing. You see yourself as this moving thing, and you're more conscious of the illusion of creating a persona, or a way of working, or what you think you're good at, or what you think you're bad at. That's all up for grabs because you keep on getting different things reflected back to you, so that's nothing I've designed. It's something that's happened naturally because I think always in the projects you choose, it's partly you seeking them and you receiving what's coming towards you, but it's also what's being offered to you.

I don't have this master plan or I don't have these specific career aspirations. I've just kind of bumped along and gone from project to project, and always looking for good people, and doing stuff that turned me on. Usually with a minimum of worrying about where they fit in the overall because I've been doing it long enough that I think if it's good work, it's good work. No matter what happens to it, if you know why you're doing it, you give it your best try. Nobody tries to make a bad movie. And then you let it go, and I think you have to have that. You've got to be able to let things go in order to really be free and make something that isn't something that you already know. You can surprise yourself a little bit more if you don't have pressure to know where you're going or what you're doing. And that's probably why I'm not a director.

"Poor Things" is currently in theaters.