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Willem Dafoe on the Art of Surrender
Four decades into the actor’s career, he is more curious about his craft than ever.
Born in Wisconsin and schooled mainly on the stages of experimental theaters in Milwaukee and then New York City, Dafoe has been a major American screen actor since his performance as a ruthless counterfeiter in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. Now 69 and with four Oscar nominations under his belt, he’s probably the closest thing modern cinema has to what his Mississippi Burning co-star Gene Hackman was back in the day. For Wes Anderson, you’ve played a lot of what I would call commando supporting roles, where you kind of parachute in and make a strong impression in a few scenes, like the dancing rat with the switchblade in The Fantastic Mr. Fox, the bookkeeper in The French Dispatch, and the assassin in The Grand Budapest Hotel. See All One of the villains in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart: a sleazy career criminal with rotten teeth who lures the hero, Sailor (Nicolas Cage), into a bank robbery in which two people are needlessly killed and threatens to rape the heroine, Lulu (Laura Dern), then suddenly loses interest.
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