There’s arguably no actor as prolific and versatile as Willem Dafoe. With over 100 credits spanning across animation, video games, blockbusters, vampires, Goblins who happen to be green, deranged seamen, Jesus Christ, and now God, he’s not only one role away from embodying the holy trinity, but he’s an artist who thrives on the impulses of performance – on feeling out of control as an actor allowing the many masks he’s been fortunate enough to wear across his storied career to address impulses he couldn’t even imagine. “The Trigger,” as Dafoe calls it, is how he arrives at those places.
“It’s something that allows you to access stuff that you cannot reach intellectually or with logic,” says Dafoe. “It’s stuff you can’t access because it’s deep within you, but there’s some sort of associative power that it puts you in a way that you’re able to feel something that usually isn’t supported and doesn’t come forth because it’s not supported. But when I have a trigger, it creates some kind of reaction where you feel different and then that all falls in tune with what your character needs to do sometimes. So, for example, working with a mask sometimes, it takes you away from yourself and you look at yourself and then you get into a whole different feeling about how you look, and how the whole world sees you, and that triggers something that you couldn’t access normally if you didn’t have that concrete thing to push you.”
Perhaps it’s therefore appropriate that he feels right at home in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, a film that uncovers the truth behind our social conditioning by nurturing the impulses of its protagonist. We follow Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman resurrected by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Dafoe), ‘God’ for short, who’s curious about the world and curious about yearns for broader experiences. Freed from the constraints of societal norms, Bella embraces a quest for equality and freedom, challenging the prejudices of her era as she seeks liberation on her unconventional voyage.
Dafoe’s God – a victim of his father’s cruel experiments and a brilliant scientist – has been both the creator and the creation, a level of life experience that God wears most prominently through his heavy and prominent facial prosthetics. Dafoe himself used these as his “Trigger” to arrive at his choices behind the performance. “The makeup effects are a huge part of it, and it’s a huge part of the character,” Dafoe explained, “because it tells you in a very short time that this guy has not had it easy, he’s had a troubled life, and it says volumes about why he’s doing what he’s doing, and how he lives his life. It really lets you know that he’s not a guy that’s collapsed under this misfortune, it pushed him to a place of compassion in the end, and that’s what gives it power for me.”
Willem Dafoe has spent more than 40 years defining himself as a character within the work of the directors whose worlds he inhabits. In our conversation with the iconic actor – video below – we also dive into his ability to consistently find the new within the familiar, how God (the character, not the father) gave him an opportunity to connect with his own family’s history, as well as his work in Robert Eggers’ upcoming Nosferatu – Dafoe’s third collaboration with the auteur, following triumphant work in The Lighthouse – and more.
Poor Things is now playing in select theaters from Searchlight Pictures with expansion in the coming weeks.
Photo by Yorgos Lanthimos. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
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