Willem Dafoe has one of the most distinctive faces and most distinctive voices in movies, deployed to great effect in blockbuster genre movies as well as smaller indie darlings; he’s played everyone from Jesus Christ to the Green Goblin. His most recent project is the highly anticipated “Nosferatu,” which opens Christmas Day. Robert Eggers’s film is a remake, more than a century later, of one of the oldest existing vampire movies, and Dafoe plays a vampire-hunting professor. After “Twilight” and hundreds of other vampire stories, “Nosferatu” aims “to make him scary again,” Dafoe told The New Yorker Radio Hour’s Adam Howard. It’s his third collaboration with the director, after “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse.” “When you do a Robert Eggers movie,” he says, “there’s a wealth of detail and it’s rooted in history. … So you enter it and the world works on you. And I love that.”
Chapter 1: What makes Willem Dafoe a versatile actor?
He also has one of the most distinctive faces and voices in movies, which has been deployed to great effect in blockbusters and smaller indie darlings. Dafoe's most recent project is the highly anticipated vampire film Nosferatu, It's his third movie with the director Robert Eggers, who's known for his ambitious and meticulously researched genre movies, like The Witch and The Northman.
In Nosferatu, Willem Dafoe plays the vampire hunter. So he's a good guy, but with a shadowy disposition.
I have seen things in this world that would have made Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb. We have not become so much enlightened as we have been blinded by the gaseous light of science. I have wrestled with the devil as Jacob wrestled the angel and pendulum. And I tell you, if we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists. Minor Hanon, we are here and come.
I spoke to Willem Dafoe about his acting philosophy and his work with the visionary director Robert Eggers. I should start by telling you I just recently showed my three-year-old fantastic Mr. Fox, and your performance left quite an impression on her. As the rat? Yeah, the rat.
Around these parts, we don't take kindly to the side of poachers. You've aged badly, Rat. You're getting a little long in the tooth yourself, Portman. Being security, why are you wearing that badge? What is it? It's my job.
She was like, why is he carrying a knife? It's one of those three-year-old questions that I'm like, there's really no good answer to that. He's just a little menacing. But I'm curious, in your experience, do you find that people have a hard time disassociating you from the roles that you play?
I think absolutely. I can pretty much tell what movies people have seen by how they behave. approach me or how they speak to me. What's the thing that you get approached about the most? Well, the most widely seen movie probably is Spider-Man, that series. So that's a lot. But I'm ridiculously admittedly proud to say that it's pretty varied, you know? Yeah.
Sometimes people try to even impress you by coming up and saying, Giving a shout out to a really obscure movie. Right. Because I make lots of movies, and some are small movies, some are big movies. So someone comes up, they talk about Spider-Man, or some older guy comes up, talks about Platoon, or some guy that is probably 30 years old now comes up and talks about Boondock Saints.
But then occasionally someone will say, I saw a new Rose Hotel yesterday. Wow, fantastic. So it's pretty varied.
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Chapter 2: How does Robert Eggers influence filmmaking?
And when he's called in to help them with this problem of the plague and Ellen, the role played by Lily Rose Depp, her condition, he tries to make them understand the value of recognizing the shadow parts of life and also tries to tell them of factual evidence of evil.
So it was really to try to get in his thinking, I guess, and basically have the authority to pretend when I say these very specific things about the nature of Solomonari and vampire lore.
Some of the beats of the story may be familiar, which might be some of the fun of the film. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on why revisit this material now.
That's really sort of a Rob Eggers question, but I've been doing enough press with him. I can pretend I'm him for a moment. But basically, you know, this is a movie he saw when he was very young. And he was obsessed with it. Initially, he saw a video of it when he was nine years old. He did a play of Nosferatu when he was in high school. He's been thinking about it a long time.
He's tried to make this movie for 10 years. He said, it's not enough to just be obsessed with something. You have to have a reason. There have been something like 170 movies Dracula vampire lore Nosferatu films made. And we've really gotten away from the scary vampire. We've come full circle and gotten to the character in Twilight, okay, who's kind of a sympathetic, sweet vampire.
He wanted him to be scary again. And he said, how do we do that? Well, we go back to the time where people actually believed there were vampires. and see what people would do, what their imagination was about it, what their evidence was of it, how they felt. So he tries to base all this on stuff that actually existed. A good example is the look of Orlok. which is very different in this film.
And to create that, he really went back to the idea of what would a 16th century Romanian nobleman that had been dead for many years look like.
During the most irregular dreams, I fear I'm taken ill. It is up. Your health. You will remain and well rest yourself. I must object, my lord. You will obey this, my counsel. But, my lord...
So that pointed to the design of the costume, that pointed to facially how he'd look, pointed to many things. He's leaning into folklore because he trusts that, he believes that. He's separating the tropes that have been created through the years in cinema, vampires, and he's trying to give it some historic base.
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Chapter 3: What is Dafoe's approach to character development?
Everybody. Ha.
We hope. No, I don't know. I think it's beautiful because that's a time where people are off and it certainly opens things up to a large audience. It's the kind of movie that really will be beautiful to see in the theaters because... Particularly his way of shooting, he works with his DP, Jerem Blaschke, on these very, very long designed takes. There's no conventional coverage.
There's no cutting away. And what's significant about that is... There's a fluidity. You can enter into these scenes much better because you're not constantly thrown out by a change of point of view. You're with these people because the incredibly long takes and when they're done skillfully, of course, you don't feel the camera movement, but you're with the people.
And for actors, it's very interesting because they're difficult to do because not only do you have to execute the actions and the intentions of your character, but you have all these technical things to think about. And when you're played as full as an actor, you can't fall out. You can only give yourself to action, and it's like an athlete, you know, running from here to there.
The task seems very simple, but how you do it, what happens to you as you do that simple task is really where the drama and the life and the presence and the revelation is.
You are so prolific. I mean, I think last year you were in seven films alone. It seems like you're, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you're ramping up lately instead of slowing down. Is there a reason for that? Or you're just finding more projects that excite you?
Yeah, when there's opportunity. I don't do movies just to do, but I do... I do think actors need practice, and I do like that. I love being on a set, so I do like to work. I like the adventure of going away someplace, leaving my world behind, my life behind for a little while and making a new one, and then coming back to my life.
And when we say seven, you know, it seems like a lot, like I was talking to my colleague, Nick Holt, who is in Nosferatu. And it seems like every week there's a new Nick Holt film. And I tease him. I say, wow, do you ever sleep? And he says, no, I was, you know, I've been home for whatever, you know, I've been home for six months. Movies get held sometimes to position them for release.
And it can seem like more than it is. I get some downtime. You know, I'm not on one set Tuesday and then starting a new one on Thursday. There are little breaks.
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Chapter 4: Why revisit classic vampire lore now?
I think people, once they find something that really touches them or makes them think about how things could be different and thinking how their lives could be different, that really elevates them. And if you don't allow tougher, more challenging movies with which feed the art form a chance, then the form is going to slowly die.
On that upbeat note. Upbeat note. Sorry. Even doing things like this, like promoting this movie, doing interviews like these, I'm sure that's changed substantially since you got started in the business, just trying to raise awareness about a film. Can you speak to that and what that's been like for you?
Just a huge thing, you know, now you're speaking to influencers also, and there's a lot of things to tapping to the TikTok of it all, so they want you to play games and do things that may not definitely define the movie, but they get... people knowing about an awareness. So it gets a little dumbed down. It's a complicated question.
It's like, yeah, I have feelings about these things, but I, you know, I'm not... I'm not a guy, when someone says, are you in the business? I kind of like look behind me and around me and think, who are you talking to? And of course I am. I've made a lot of movies. I've been making movies for, I don't know, over 40 years. So I am, but I don't think of it as a business.
So all these questions, it's like I'm too busy working in movies to think about these things.
Thank you so much, Willem, for doing this. I really appreciate it. It's been a thrill to talk to you. Okay.
I hope I was coherent enough for you.
Thank you so much.
Okay. All right. Okay. Ciao, ciao.
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Chapter 5: What is unique about the new Nosferatu film?
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