More than 45 years into a career that spans four Oscar nominations and celebrated collaborations with Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow, Lars von Trier, David Lynch and Robert Eggers, Willem Dafoe has become accustomed to autograph and selfie hunters. Mostly he is accosted by fans of the Spider-Man films during which he redefined Marvel supervillainy with repeated turns as the Green Goblin. It’s a role, he says, that gets you recognised in Timbuktu.
“You know, there are different stages in life,” Dafoe says. “You need different things. Your ambitions are different. And how do you measure things like success or failure? So it’s all great food. I don’t think in terms of what I do as a career, but I can’t be so falsely modest not to say, ‘Wow, we’ve done some stuff.’”
Career contemplation is a natural reach for the star of Late Fame, a contemporary adaptation of a novella by Arthur Schnitzler, author of the source material for Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut.
Dafoe, still gravelly and charismatic, stars as Ed Saxberger, a forgotten New York writer who has spent decades working at the post office after publishing a single, little-noticed volume of poetry in the late 1970s. In the evenings he shoots billiards with his proudly blue-collar friends in a local dive where Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby plays on the jukebox.
Saxberger’s workaday routine is disrupted when Wilson Meyers, a young admirer with an old trust fund, played by Edmund Donovan, tracks him down and introduces him to a circle of aspiring young artists. As the fractious group, styling itself the Enthusiasm Society, embraces him as a rediscovered literary figure, Saxberger is forced to reckon with the authenticity of those who have suddenly taken interest.
The project, directed by Kent Jones and written by Samy Burch, came to the actor through an extraordinary coincidence.
Dafoe was talking to a friend about the kind of work that interested him when that pal flagged a rediscovered Schnitzler novel. Dafoe read it, recognised that it could become a film and pitched it to his friend and frequent collaborator Abel Ferrara. Later he encountered Jones, another friend, on a flight. They talked about everything except Late Fame. Jones was subsequently approached to direct the film.
“This friend, a writer and actor in New York by the name of Danny Shapiro, sent me a Schnitzler short novel that was recently rediscovered,” Dafoe says. “It was interesting. But it was clear that it was not a movie for Abel. I hung on to that, and I read it a couple times. I thought: this really speaks to me.
“It was in my rucksack when I ran into Kent Jones on a plane. And then he called a couple of days later and said, ‘There’s this script called Late Fame.’ I said: ‘I know!’”
William James Dafoe (nicknamed Willem after the Dutch variation), the son of a surgeon and nurse, grew up with five sisters in Appleton, Wisconsin, the sometime hometown of Harry Houdini. He enrolled in the drama department at the University of Milwaukee but dropped out in search of avant-garde and experimental work, ending up in the New York of the bohemian mid-1970s.
Alongside his former partner Elizabeth LeCompte, and Spalding Grey, Dafoe was a founding member of the Wooster Group, the renowned New York experimental-theatre company that he describes as having been his day job for some three decades.
“I never considered myself not a theatre actor. That’s my identity, you know?” he says.
Willem Dafoe rehearsing The Old Woman at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, 2014. Photograph: Ruby Washington/The New York Times
That makes sense. Dafoe, for all his success, still comes across as the sort of fellow you would expect to meet at an avant-garde space in the East Village that no longer exists. Late Fame neatly intersects with the actor’s early years in the Big Apple. His character frequently reflects upon, or is quizzed about, his contemporaries and the changing cultural life of a now gentrified city.
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Dafoe immediately identified people he had known or observed as the downtown artistic scene changed.
“I came to New York at a time where, to my mind, there was a lot of interesting artistic activity,” he says. “And I was working in a theatre company. I wasn’t a man about town. I was just a kid trying to make theatre in a tiny little theatre company. And we were working hard. We weren’t all hanging out together. It wasn’t quite out every night to poetry readings and all that sort of thing. But I know the vibe. There was a scene, and I could relate to it.”
Dafoe may not have been a scenester, but between the Wooster Group and its forerunner the Performance Group, an influential troupe founded by the theatre director Richard Schechner, he encountered such creatives as the film-maker Brian De Palma, the theatre director Richard Foreman, the playwright Sam Shepard and the performance artist Joan Jonas, all working in the same buzzy city as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Fab 5 Freddy.
Late Fame: Willem Dafoe. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima/Magnolia Pictures
Not all those survived to tell the tale.
“I’ve seen a lot of people who were very engaged in that scene when they were young, and then, when the scene went away or changed radically – as the art world did, as the downtown theatre world did, as even experimental film did – you saw some of them kind of get left behind and take on different lives. So it’s something I could relate to, even though that wasn’t necessarily my story.”
Late Fame also placed Dafoe among younger actors, creating a parallel between the film’s story and his experience of making it. He had been acting for decades; his younger costars were initially shy and respectful, before the relationship behind the scenes shifted.
Late Fame: Greta Lee and Willem Dafoe in Kent Jones’s film. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima/Magnolia Pictures
“I always like movies where the making of the movie – the experience of doing the movie – is the movie,” Dafoe says. “And this was one of those cases, because, with a little adaptation, I was experiencing that, because these were younger actors. I’m an older actor. I’ve been around for a while, so it was kind of inevitable that they were shy at first.”
Let us not play this down. Possessor of an original mind and adventurous taste, Dafoe is more than an elder statesman to the coming generation. He is a bit of a legend.
“They were respectful,” he says. “But they started, once we got comfortable and they felt like we had a good relationship, asking me questions and asking for advice. And so the parallel with the younger characters in the movie was very strong.”
The subject of Late Fame, notably what fame does to a person, and what happens as life and career progress, also gave Dafoe, who is now married to the Italian director Giada Colagrande, a way to contemplate his own passage through work and the city, without the film being especially autobiographical.
“It’s nice to get a project that really applies to you, but it’s not confessional,” he says. “It’s just food for thought, because there’s something truthful and something interesting about what it’s addressing, not in a didactic way, but it’s in the air. And then you lay on top of that the fact of getting older and having a parallel career.”
Late Fame arrives during a busy year for Dafoe; he will soon be seen in Tenzing, a dramatisation of Edmund Hillary’s Everest adventure, and Robert Eggers’s Oscar-fancied Werwulf.
It’s a typically eclectic selection from a performer who, for decades, has effortlessly shifted between theatre and film, between experimental work and big productions, and between directors with radically different sensibilities.
His relationship with acting, however, remains rooted in the theatre and in the idea of discovery: finding something in a project that he could not have anticipated before beginning it. He once told me that if he ever found himself thinking that he wanted to play Robinson Crusoe, there would be no point, because he would already have imagined his way through the role.
“Of course, you’re pretending. Of course, you’re being another person,” he says. “But you can fill it with certain questions you have and certain feelings you have and queries you have. And whenever you can do that, that really creates an engagement that you just can’t beat, because something is happening to you.
“You’re experiencing something rather than interpreting something. If you’re having an experience, then hopefully the people watching will too. Because if you’re sincere and your interest and your point of contact is real, then people may like it or not, but it’s there for them to dig in.”
He pauses.
“I don’t tell stories. The stories tell me what to do.”
Dafoe has fashioned a distinguished career as the interpreter of real-life figures, including Vincent van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate, a performance that earned him an Oscar nomination and the Volpi Cup for best actor at Venice. He has also played the doomed director Pier Paolo Pasolini in Ferrara’s Pasolini, and TS Eliot in Tom & Viv.
Dafoe also, of course, played Jesus in Scorsese’s controversial The Last Temptation of Christ, drawing from Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novelisation of the four canonical gospels. Despite the wealth of historical materials available on these and other Dafoe gigs, he favours unknowability over research.
Willem Dafoe on the set of The Last Temptation of Christ. Photograph: Universal Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty
“When I finish a movie, I don’t know who a character is, but I have experienced some things that brought me closer to answering my questions about them. Basically, that’s where you want to be: a place of inquiry and wonder. It feeds your curiosity. You learn things.”
Dafoe says he never consciously sought out film work. And his first foray was hardly auspicious. He was cast as a “glorified extra” in Heaven’s Gate, Michael Cimino’s 1980 megaflop. He barely made it into the finished film, having spent three months on the famously overextended Montana production. During an eight-hour lighting set-up, an extra told him a joke. Dafoe laughed; Cimino heard him and told him to leave the set.
He was subsequently fired. His character was largely cut. Though the actor can still be glimpsed in the released film, he went uncredited. (Fittingly, many years later, Dafoe narrated the documentary Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate.)
Happily, talented directors did eventually find him the right parts. The actor’s first leading role was as the leader of a biker gang in Kathryn Bigelow’s low-budget The Loveless, from 1981. That performance gave a hint as to what the industry would eventually do with him. He carries the picture without losing any of his compelling strangeness.
Willem Dafoe in 1987. Photograph: Bob Riha jnr/Getty
Dafoe has a particularly strong bond with Ferrara. He has worked with Paul Schrader on seven fruitful occasions, including, strikingly, as a drug courier, in Light Sleeper, and as the pornographer John Henry Carpenter in the undervalued Auto Focus. Repeated collaborations with Schnabel and Wes Anderson further confirm how important he judges the relationship between actor and director to be.
“I always like to attach myself to auteurs and be the doer of their vision,” he says. “That’s my job. That’s my pleasure, because then I’m free. Because I get to live it. I get to create it in my body, in the things that I know and I trust.”
That hasn’t stopped Dafoe dallying in the mainstream. Those Marvel fans still want to meet the Green Goblin. You can hear his voice in Finding Nemo. But most committed fans will still think of the undimmed cold fire the actor brings to more layered roles. Here is a man emotionally connected to the material.
“When people aren’t that passionate, aren’t that inspired, I can’t do that,” he says. “When it’s dry and technical, it’s not a life adventure. I’ve been in all kinds of movies, but I’m very much attracted when there’s a director with a very specific vision. There’s a passion level, and there’s a concentration, and there’s a particularity. And I just want to be their creature.”
Late Fame is in cinemas from Friday, September 4th