The Transformations of Actor Willem Dafoe

Published Dec 10, 2023, 9:00 AM

Willem Dafoe has built a career out of shapeshifting. His latest role in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things demonstrates exactly that.

Today, he joins us to discuss his compelling performance in the imaginative tale (7:00), the elaborate details he discovered on set (9:20), and the three-hour physical transformation he underwent each day of filming (12:38). Then, Dafoe describes his upbringing in Wisconsin (15:15), his early love of B-movies (20:04), and his formative years in the theater as part of The Wooster Group in New York City (26:45).

On the back-half, we dive into his task-based approach to acting (35:55) and how it guided his memorable performances in the late William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (41:10), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (43:52), and Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (49:44). To close, Dafoe reflects on the joy of collaboration (53:30), his search for truth as an actor (57:25), and his desire to continue creating in years to come (1:00:50).

For questions, comments, or to join our mailing list, drop me a line at sf@talkeasypod.com.

Pushkin.

This is talk easy. I'm standing forgo Soo. Welcome to the show today. I'm joined by legendary actor Willem Dafoe. I sat with them back in twenty seventeen around the release of Sean Baker's The Florida Project, for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In the six years since then, Dafoe has kept remarkably busy. He was nominated again in twenty nineteen for his portrayal of Vincent van Gogh in at Eternity's Gate. He also made two films with Roberdegger's The Lighthouse and The Northman, and two films with Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch and Asteroid City, not to mention Giermmel del Toro's Nightmare Alley and Paul Schrader's The Card Counter. And those are just my personal favorites of his in recent years. His latest, however, is a film called Poor Things, directed by your goost Lamthimos. In it, Defau plays doctor Godwin Baxter, a daring scientist who brings a young woman back to life through a rather unorthodox experiment once she's born. Bella, played by Emma Stone, embarks on a kind of voyage of sexual liberation. Here's a clip from the trailer.

This is Bella, Bella.

This is mister mccandall's hello Bella.

No, she's an experiment.

Good evening.

Her rain and her body are not quite synchronized, but she is progressing at an accelerat decrease.

Tell me where did she come from?

I shall orrige is a happy too.

I am Bella Baxter.

And there is a world to enjoy, circumnavigate. It is the goal of all to progress.

Grow a woman plotting her course to freedom and delightful.

Oh. That was from the new film Poor Things, now in limited release across the country. To check for showings in your area, visit poor thingsfilm dot com. The movie is exclusively playing in theaters at the moment and is really one of those that if you can, you should venture out to see. Lonthimos has made other rich, dark comedies like The Lobster and The Favorite, but Poor Things is unlike anything I've ever seen. It's a coming of age story, dystopian merchant ivory film, and then ultimately a sort of inversion of the Frankenstein story. The foe who's in the role of the father ends up becoming this strange, beating heart of the movie. It's also a deceptively moving performance, more tender and warm than the characters you probably know him from and film like To Live and Die in La Platoon, Wild at Heart. The list goes on, many of which we discuss in this conversation. We also talk about his early love of B movies, why this role as a doctor is an especially personal one, his formative years as part of the Wooster Group, and the guiding principles that have shaped a lifetime of brilliant performances. That's all coming up next with our guest, Willem Dafoe. Willem Dafoe. Yes, Hi, thank you for being here.

My pleasure.

How are you feeling.

I feel good. I haven't been in La rightly, so it's nice to be back.

Oh is that a good thing? Not being here?

No, I'm happy when I'm here. I've never really lived here lived here. I've lived here for periods of I'm doing movies, so I'm usually happy because I'm working. I'm doing something that I like. Also, La, I see friends that I don't normally see. You know, I put up with the car stuff.

You want to travel by foot or by train. Yes, why don't we start with this new movie of yours?

Sounds good.

It's called Poor Things. It's directed by your ghost Lantemos, and in it you play a lonely scientist with a disfigured face, yes, whose latest experiment finds him reanimating a thirty something meter corpse played by Emma Stone by replacing her defunct brain with that of an unborn child.

Her unborn child.

You're spoiling it, not me detail. Yeah, it's a good detail. But I was going to say, as I explained that.

Movie, it's sort of important that it is important.

I just felt like it comes later. I don't know we can litigate this.

Yeah, you know, I'm not one of those people.

I know, no neither.

My wife is always don't tell me, don't tell me, even when I'm working on a movie.

I don't want.

I don't want no thing. I just want to see the movie, you know, And I don't get it. I can watch a movie kind of knowing what happens, because I can will my brain to forget where we're going and try to be with each.

Scene suspension of disbelief, and there they go. Yeah, that's the basic premise of the film. How would you describe the world of the project, the world that you inhabited as a character and an actor.

Well, it's an imagined Victorian world, and it's got all these kind of steampunk elements. You know, there's these advancements in science that are kind of fantastical next to things of that period. So it's a playful reimagining or imagining of Victorian time that never was. So you're leaning into Victoriana, but you're also spinning. So the world is very specific. It's so beautifully designed and so complete that as an actor, you're enter that world and it really tells you what to do because there's nothing like it. So your response is to it, of course, in tandem with the script really very clear. There's there's a kind of reality in the fantasy. That's the kind of place as an actor that I enjoy.

Being on set. You would often walk around what they had built, right, I mean, what would that look.

I like to hang out on the set just to know what's going on, and it's a special time, you know, you get to be there watch the other people see what's going on. Also, it's a way to relax into being there, and the set was fantastic, and I had a degree of detail to go for a walking there and just poke around, go into the library, open up books, you know, check out some of the weird objects. That was a wealth of information for me.

What did you find walking around?

You know? The crazy thing is there would be a whole bookshelf and I would randomly pull out a book and inside would be legit surgical diagrams and things specific to our story.

This is beyond the typical prop work.

Oh yes, I love my props.

A level of detail, a.

Level of detail, you know, And at the same time, it wasn't precious, you know, we weren't. I don't know. It just helps you a great deal and it's not shown off. It was just the pleasure of making those things. I think the production people, the design people just kind of enjoyed it, and your gost probably gently let them go, you know, and worked with them on it.

I don't philosophically, you don't believe that one transforms into the character.

I'm not sure that's true.

Do you think that's wrong? No, because the quote I have for you is people will often ask you, how did you transform into the character? And your response often is the character is already in me, it's lived in me. It's not a kind of metamorphosis that happens.

Well, that is a metamorphosis, because that's not where you're showing, and that's not necessarily what you're concentrating on. So there is a transformation because you're taking another shape you're presenting, or you're living a different aspect of you that doesn't get exercised, the idea being that the character is born of situations, a series of reactions and living that the character appears. So okay, I suppose that's a transformation. But the fact that it's within you, just like it's within.

You, that seems like a key distinction.

Though maybe it is because I find more and more it's important to get away from them notion of ownership of an identity and the idea of saying, oh, all characters are within us. Then you don't have everything relative to who you think you are. It's kind of open and you accept just like I say, you have those characters in you too, and they would emerge given the right circumcircumstances. You're not practiced at it, and that's not your job, So that's not going to happen, but the possibility is there. We're thinking broad broad strokes, like you know, we're all brothers and sisters. Broad strokes.

Well, we're diving into philosophy about thirty minutes before I thought we would. Okay, but I love it.

I love it.

We're talking in the morning. I'm here for it. I'm here for it. In this case, the actual physical transformation that you had to undergo. I wonder you're playing a doctor who works on people, but in order to play that part, you yourself had to be worked on for hours and hours and hours. Yes, how did that shape your approach to the character in this story?

In the story? Once again, you correct me because I'm not that sensitive to spoilers.

I don't make a habit to correct my guests. Okay, and you can do especially not willing to find I'm inviting you.

Please. My father his backstory, if you will, used me for experiments and also introduced me to this word of a world of objective science, and it had a horrible effect on me. Not only am I.

Disfigured literal scars.

Literal scars, There's certain things that I'm unable to do physically, and I need help with my digestion. I'm basically impotent because he's operated on my genitals. He handed me a pretty bad hand.

You're smiling as you're saying, well.

The beauty is the beauty. He turns his pain into a certain devotion towards science, something positive, something positive, And it always disturbs me when people describe him as a mad scientist, because he's really quite compassionate and quite on top of it in the sense that he's handed a really bad hand and he plays it well. But getting back to his makeup, to be in the chair for a long period of time, you know, actors love to complain about their process and look all brave and dedicated by how difficult it is.

But actually, that was my next question, how brave are.

The Actually it's a pleasure. It's difficult to do. But then you sit in the chair and you start to recede as they put these pieces on you, they glue them to your face. You can't sleep because you have to cooperate with them, because some of the pieces are quite intricate and delicate, and you sit there for a long time looking at yourself at least superficially go away and something else emerges, and that really is a beautiful preparation to say, guess what willam went by by? We're trying to inhabit this other thing under these circumstances, so it's a good preparation. By the time everyone else gets there and you're ready to shoot, you're in the groove.

Hopefully you know when it comes to your makeup. This is an especially personal role for you, in part because your father was a doctor for forty years. He worked out of this industrial paper mill tout at Appleton, Wisconsin, where your mother also worked alongside with him as a nurse. But my understanding is that this clinic was at the center of a pretty agricultural community, yes, where patients would come from all over the place, very far. They traveled great distances to see him, which you saw firsthand working as a janitor there.

Right.

I wondered, what did you make of the relationship between the patients and your parents.

Ah, it's funny. My mother she worked as a nurse, and she'd also work in the lab, and she did all kinds of things. She was the original super mother. She had eight children and she worked all during that time. I was basically brought up by my older sisters. But when I was a janitor, and sometimes I was around these people that came from very far away would be sitting in the waiting room and my father, who was basically an intestinal surgeon but also did many things, you know, was basically functioning as a GP, would get called out for surgery, emergency surgery, so all these people would have to wait. Oh, and my mother would kind of deal with them, and they'd cuss her out and they'd be angry and treat her horribly because you know, some dairy farmer that never moved, never leaves his farm, goes into the big city of fifty thousand one day and sits around for ten hours written for the doctor to up here. And then my father would breeze in at about seven o'clock in the evening and he'd want to see patients, and they'd see him and they were like, oh, doctor, and they give my mother a dirty look. So that really informed a lot of my relationships. It gave me a lot of information about how different people in different positions are treated, and you know, gender roles and that sort of thing.

That's what I want to ask you about actually, because I read about this and what you're describing as a gap and a difference in distance and behavior from one person to the next. They treated your father like the hero who came down from god knows where, and your mother.

As that whole that's making them.

Wait, exactly, what did that tell you about people.

That they you know, it's back to poor things, you know, it really shows how they're socially conditioned, and when they get squeezed, when they don't feel comfortable, they go to those kind of attitudes and kind of stereotypes and kind of ways. They aren't thinking. They're in panic mode, they're in frustrated mode, and they sort of adopt these righteous positions without thinking about them. So one thing about poor Things is it has a lot to do with identity and social conditioning. And the beauty is that this main character, and beautifully played by Emma Stone, she's not just a person without a filter. She's basically a child in a woman's body who hasn't been conditioned socially. So she doesn't have a filter, but it doesn't come out of some kind of stance. It's just it's not her experience, and she sees very clearly. So she's kind of like the wise one and the innocent.

At the same time, you called it a spin on Frankenstein.

Well, that's the setup, right, that's the setup. But it's quite different when you think Frankenstein and the doctor put a criminal's brain into this creature. This is different.

But the way it's upending our ideas around gender and possession, I think is fascinating.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the heart of it. And you know, much is made of the sexuality because that's the entertaining part. And it does have a lot to do with poking holes and kind of our puritanical sometimes stances on what is correct or incorrect behavior in terms of expression of sexuality or sexual experience.

It's funny because your upbringing you alluded to this, but you have five sisters. I think we're pretty responsible for raising you and shaping probably some of your ideas around the stuff that we're talking.

About very much.

Your parents worked together. They were workaholics. You always describe them as such. I'm curious because I want to go back to your dad for a moment. Growing up, he would make these trips to Chicago with my mother.

I think they were romantic getaways.

To get away from the eight children.

Yeah, and the work yeah.

And when they returned, it's my understanding that he would come back with these super eight films that you would watch together, one of which was Frankenstein in these monster movies. Yes, what was that?

Like? I wouldn't watch them so much with him. He'd really give them as presents.

Okay, and he said, get away from me, you go watch.

He was cool, but like I said, he was a workaholics. So we didn't spend that much time together. But that was great. And we had a little Bell and Howell projector and we show them over and over again on that love do you know the there was a little lever where you could slow motion that go backwards, and I remember particularly I was struck by the moment in Bride of Frankenstein where he reaches for the lever, the lever and says, we belong dead, and a single tear goes down his face and then he pulls the lever that destroys everything.

Looks Beliva Tova to prous all dresses, we belong dead.

Even as a child, I thought, wow, I'm trying to take but you know, going back to my sisters, I mean, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but that was very important. You know, my brothers and myself, we were burdened by this kind of role, role by role to following my father's footsteps and to be successful. And that was available to us because we were white, middle class men. My sisters, you know, the big thing was to make sure that they got an education and not get pregnant, you know. And I saw that because there was less pressure on them, they were able to develop in much stronger ways than we were because we developed an eye of seeing ourselves in the outside world, and they weren't afforded that because they were shut out of a lot of those opportunities. So I've always I've always kind of thought, oh, how cool would be a girl? I mean, I might being my.

Guy, But that's going to be the title of the episode now. In this house, you said once it was a terrific distaste for introspection and reflection. That was selfish. You said, you're supposed to go forward to produce, to make your mark, and I have that in my blood as a kid than a teenager, you know, in this town of fifty thousand, What did making your mark look like to you? What did you think of that?

I think it was about being successful being admired, being able to take care of yourself. There was a kind of self reliant you know, don't depend on anyone. It's all about the individual, where much later in life I shifted more towards and not actually not much later in life. I mean, my life has always been about the collective, collaboration and the collective. But the truth is what I said, the quote that you said, it's true. But then there was the flip side of that that we were children left alone because both my parents worked, probably not at the beginning so much. I'm at the bottom half of the family. But we used to do crazy things and make everything a game, and I think that had a huge influence on me, this idea of a group of people making something. If we had to clean the house, we'd make it a game and someone would officiate and you know, we'd get a play back play, you'd have a referee that I say it now and it's kind of embarrassing. No, it's silly stuff. But there was a great sense of play and a great sense of collaboration, and the idea of fantasy and play was very important to getting stuff done.

You were big on pranks back then.

Weren't you, I was, I was, boy, you're really hitting me hard on the on the childhood stuff.

I have a bunch of things where you you enjoyed fake vomit. Yeah, yeah, you dressed up as an ape and protested the plan of the apes. Yes, these are hard hitting things right here.

Well, they're hard hitting when you consider I'm a man of a certain age and talking about this stuff. I mean, it's memorable and it was fun. And still I think that sense of play is important.

I think so. I actually think it is worth noting, because of your love of performance art to me that it starts there.

I was reminded that I was doing an interview actually earlier today about a collaboration I did with Marina Bramovich, my favorite, and the guy was asking very much about what were things we had in common, you know, and I said, well, in some ways we have a lot that were not in common. But I did recall when I was a child, when the astronauts were going up that really caught my you know, going up to the moon and the astronaut thing was very strong for me. So I remember wondering could I do that? Could I be that? And I used to lock myself in the closet to see if I could stand to be by myself for long periods of time, which feels a little bit like something has something in relationship to the impulse that Marina has when she was doing some of her earlier work.

Could you you know I tried a couple of days, that's important thing.

No, I didn't even make it a day. You know, you'd leave to be and that sort of thing.

Oh, you know what, I'm hearing some noise out there hungry? Did someone call my name? Or that I got to go out?

No, I was. What I'm bragging about is the impulse. I know, not about the result in this case.

That's right, and the and the impulse is a good indicator of what was to come.

I think, Well, it's just this idea that turned on to create a circumstance where you can find out about yourself, about your almost existential questions, even as a kid, you know, to try to give some kind of shape to your experience, and sometimes you have to do things to pin down exactly how you feel.

You said once in an old magazine that doesn't exist anymore, called Drama Logue. You said, this is pathetically but when I was younger, I think I was profoundly disappointed by the world and I felt like an outsider, and that led me to things outside my family. Did life outside your family begin with theater acts? You know, this acting group that you joined in college, even before even before.

Yeah, I think in the sense that in this collaboration and in making theater pieces and being an actor, being in a group of people with a project, applying themselves, coming together and then doing something publicly, that started quite early when I was even younger, even before I was out of the house. I think seeking that community and I found that in community theater and shows at school, that sort of thing. But the truth is, you know, I didn't really know people that were actors or made their living being artists of any kind, so it wasn't a realistic career goal. And then you put that next to that kind of striving, you got to produce kind of atude that I grew up with, and they were at war. And I think basically I never decided, and I'm really struck that I went towards situations and people and never really decided to be an actor. But the situations and people kind of compounded the situation and after a while, I looked around and said, well, I guess I'm an actor because I'm not doing anything else. That's not to say that I didn't try to train. I went to school very briefly, but I was too eager to perform. I was too eager to be out in the world and to not be in the hothouse of, you know, being in a university theater department.

So you went towards New York City.

New York City, and I got called back a little bit by theater accidentent touring with them, and that was big eye opening because we got picked up by a Dutch producer that brought us to a tour in Europe. And what was significant about that is there was one place in particular in Amsterdam called the Mickery Theater, and they were very well funded at that time. The director of that theater basically went around the world and cherry picked things that he liked as far as theater, usually avant garde stuff. And I was there watching this stuff some of the best companies in the world, some of the most radical theater in the world. And that had a profound effect on me because it was inspiring.

What did that look like?

You know, it was more influenced by event and spectacle, and also less by literature and psychology, more by dance, performance, visual art, mixed media, those sorts of things.

In New York in seventy six seventy seven, when you first discovered the performance group right, which would then turn into the group, you called it kind of what you're saying now. You called it a laboratory. They were publicly creating these opportunities for their own personal liberation. So I have two questions.

On this liberation I'm reaching. I mean, I think that's true, but that's but that's not what we were thinking of. We were young kids that were just attracted to people and having fun.

And so that younger Willan with that quote that was a reach, that was a reach for liberation. No, that was you, not me.

No, I said that. Probably that was the old Willam talking about the young woman and the uh incorrectly.

He said, he said woman, what I think was a slip.

I got women on my mind.

Is that always true? No?

No, No, I'm I'm talking about poor things.

So liberation is a reach.

I mean what I want to paint is you're downtown and there are all these people that are coming. They're practicing stuff that they haven't been trained at. I think that's true, and that was quite remarkable, you know. And there are examples you can go back to people like David Byrne went to Risdy, but what did he end up doing? Making music? It was all mixed up and there was a community of people. My former partner, Elizabeth Lecomte, the director of the Wooster Group, used to always say we're a community theater, and that would bother me because I think, well, that means we're not professional, you know. She said, no, we're a community theater and our community is so And at that time Soho was full of a lot of life, life and activity, and that's really it's hard to measure. But really the art, the art world started to boom, and with it a certain kind of boom in non traditional theater. We weren't careerists trying to go towards something. We were doing something.

For now, I would say careerist and Wooster Group. I don't think those two have ever been in the same sentence together.

It's kind of a miracle they still exist.

The word that does come up often, and I think it's a description you don't particularly like, oh no, because I'm in agreement with you. But in the press, the Wooster Group is often described as a kind of deconstruction of theater and performance. But I know you have often found that description to be kind of contradictory. Why is that.

Because it feels, you know, that sounds like a post modern, heady kind of thing that just wasn't my experience. We were playing around, we were doing things that interested us. We were taking plays that we were interested in and sometimes cutting them up, doing our favorite part because we were using it kind of iconographically in a larger sense, we were using pieces of the culture to construct not necessarily a narrative, but let's say, a collage of our experience and our interests. So that's a little different than this kind of deconstruy deconstruction. Maybe it's accurate, I don't know, but the point is it sounded very heavy and very like we had a mission and we had this post modern idea where where it was more direct than that, and more essential than that, and more practical than that. For example, we worked with a lot of home video equipment before people were integrating video projections and that kind of stuff into theater work. It wasn't a grand idea. It was a solution.

You know.

It's like we had a night.

Do you mean by that a solution?

Here's a good example. We were doing a production of Three Sisters chechos, three sisters, and the sisters were quite elderly. We cast up. There was one servant role where that was played by Steve Passami's grandmother and I think she was like ninety or something like that. Well, she couldn't be there, so we put her on video and we'd wheel out a television and we'd play the scenes with her. That sounds like ooh, some heady no thing, but it was practical because it means to es there would be space involves left, so we could do interact with her and it became a score, it became a dance.

I like that. I think the reason I bring it up is because deconstruction seems to imply that it's coiled down to something, that there is a desired effect. And you've often said we didn't know where we were going. That's true, there's a malleability that you wanted to keep, and I think that definition makes it something there's a fixed outcome.

Right, Well, yeah, particularly as an actor, I always feel a little irresponsible because I truly don't know what stuff means. But that's not important in my role as long as my engagement, my level of engagement in doing what I do is fully committed. It's called the leap of faith. You're really diving into something that you don't exactly know, but the quality of going towards that thing is what's important, I think, because if you know exactly where you're going, you tend to race to it somewhere and then craft kind of a a trip.

It's mapped but not lived.

It's mapped but not lived. Thank you. That's good.

And still that you apparently have to do a Dak Shepherd podcast, So if you just want to take that with you, just make sure you quote me on it.

Okay, I think it'd be a hell of a lot different.

Well, that's good. That's good. I don't think that's a compliment.

Are you guys in competition?

There's no competition between us. He is a famous movie star and I'm twenty nine.

You're twenty nine. That's right, young man.

You're alluding to those great directors that you've worked with and how you take a leap of faith with them. I want to talk about those in a second. But the one thing before you jump into the movies, this thing that we're kind of circling, the way in which you developed your craft. There's an essay in the Drama Review from nineteen eighty five called Task and Vision, Task and Vision Vision in the form of a task. Can you explain to me what that means to you and how it is kind of foundational to how you approach this work.

For your audience. I'll make it real.

Simple, great good where Philistine's no.

For me, I'll make it real simple. I think that was very much about the idea of everything is based on doing as opposed to showing. One of the beauty, beautiful things about the Wooster group, which really put a heavy stamp on me and really created While I don't have a fixed way of approaching things, I have tendencies that I recognize, and in that theater, the technicians were as important as the actors, and the actors were as important as the technicians, and sometimes they sho tasks and the truth was they weren't all that different. I also think you experienced that in something like the Florida Project, where you know the professional actor learns from the person that's not an actor. It's about having an experience, have something happened to you that's transparent enough that the audience can be with you and hopefully can have something a flavor of that experience, right, and it can broaden how we think, or it can give us other possibilities. I mean, that's the idea. Rather than telling us something that we already know or we recognize, put us in a place where you say, hmm, it's what I like going to the movies for it. It's like, wow, I never thought of that way, or wow, I've got to learn to be less this and more like that because you see an example of some personal generosity or heroism or something and it inspires you that's what you want to get. It's about, in real time, giving yourself to something that expresses a more collective experience.

After the break, more from William Defoe.

Coming back, I want to talk about the things that have happened to you by way of some of these films that we can't possibly talk about all of them because life is short and you have things to do, but I want to highlight some that are particularly important to me. Okay, the first one is to Live and Die in la It's directed by the late William Freakin Rest in Peace. We started this conversation talk about the world of poor things and the vision of your goes. I thought we should probably use that as a framework to discuss these other movies. What was the vision of that film and what was your role in it? What happened to you in it that you put on screen.

Ah, well, it was a beautiful role because it's a you know, he's a counterfeiter, he's an artist, he's also a criminal. That's all floating around.

Inside this guy, and that's it whole a trinity.

Yeah. Where Billy Friedkin was at that moment, he had had great successes and recently, as he was rolling into that, he had had some not so great successes. A sorcerer maybe a sorcerer I think. I'm told I don't know this because I was just a kid at the time, But that really set him back as far as his currency to get money and choose projects. So he was like he was always kind of iconic, plastic and always had a little chip, you know, in a nice way, and he was like, well, so damn it, I'm going to make a movie and He was determined to cast actors that nobody knew. In fact, I remember at the audition he said, yeah, I'm interested because nobody knows you. I mean, nobody knows Billy, nobody knows John. You know, they'll be able to enter the story better because they don't have any association outside of the story. There was a part of him that was very intellectual and very bright, and that was another part of him that was like a street kid. You know. He wanted to get dirty, you know, he wanted to check out these worlds, and he entered this world of counterfeitters and criminals. It was great fun to shoot. Sometimes you'd show up and he say, you know what, we're not going to do that today. We're going to do something else. On my way home, I found this fabulous location and I thought we'd do a scene, and then he'd invent things. So he's very fluid, very inspired, a lot of fun, but also wild because he liked to jump off the bridge, you know, find his wings on the way down.

Did you like to jump off with him?

I tried, I tried, you know, I mean his big instruction to me was, and I remember this so well, Zen Will Zen and the truth is then I knew nothing, but zen Zen just meant simple to me.

What does it mean now?

Simple?

How did that fluidity that you're describing, How did that contrast with Oliverstone on Platoon because he discovered the fluidity there too, because.

We were shooting in the jungle and you don't control things, you know, and we were doing an incredible amount of setups today because Bob Richardson, you know, was very loose and very fast and there was very little lighting or rehearsal, so so much of it was going drawing your equipment, putting on your uniform, no makeup, no trailers, nothing, We're in the jungle. And then they say, this is what we're doing, and we set it up and.

We do it.

We play soldier, you know. We tried to learn how to do soldier things, which we did to some degree, but we did it with a terrific pressure to honor authenticity because we were working with people that had been there, and of course Platoon was based on his personal experience. So you didn't want to distort or hollywood up this passion project.

Why would they look, here's you as Sergeant Elias and Oliverstone's Platoon from nineteen eighty six.

It's a beautiful night.

Yeah, I love this place, that night, this dies. There's no right or wrong in them.

You're just there.

It's a nice way of putting it.

Barnes's got it in for you, doesn't he.

Barnes believes in what he's doing, and you you believe sixty five? Yeah, Now, now what happened today is just the beginning.

We're gonna lose this.

War around this time. You gave this interview and you said, and I think it's instructive to how we talk about and understand the things you've done. He said, I have no obligation to be transformed into something that I'm not. It all remains me in that. It all remains my experience, my history. Sergeant Elias means nothing to me. Sergeant Elias was me during this period of time in the Philippines under these ground rules. I think all characters live in you. You just frame them, give them circumstances, and that character will happen.

Wow, I'm still stuck in that?

Are you stuck in that? Or is there a freedom in that? No, there's a freedom.

Listen. The problem with talking about what you do is it's very imprecise, and you know, I like talking about it because it's imprecise and it's slippery, and it moves around, and for every project you've got to remake your process. It's slippery. So you say, you say some stuff that's not true all the time because you're reaching for some little points of contact of language, of language. You can work from that and jump off from that.

Well, how did you remake yourself in the films of Paul Schrader. You've made a handful of moves with them. I'm thinking about Light Sleeper, most recently The Card Counter. When you think of him and those experiences, what comes to mind.

Well, I've worked a lot with Paul. He talks about you know, he does a lot of his work in the writing. When he casts, he kind of relies on you to come up with the goods. I remember in Light Sleeper.

Loved that movie.

Yeah, it's a good movie, I think, And it was an important movie to me because it's a very New York movie. And also it's one of the few times where I felt like, oh, if my life was different, I could be this guy. So it felt very close to me.

You felt that, yeah, I did.

And also the research of it because that was a period of not me personally, but a lot of drug use in New York because I play a white color drug dealer. I remember Paul. I thought, God, this guy doesn't talk to me. We do the shots. I like the script. I'm engaged. I'm doing things that I've learned how to do. It's interesting. New York is my town, I know it. I felt very comfortable, but at the same time, there was a little bit of insecurity about he didn't talk to me. And about two days after that thought was obsessing me. We're going up in an elevator and he says, hey, Willem, I know I don't talk to you too much about what you're doing, but you're doing fine. So once again, he makes a world. He makes the world in the writing, and they're usually fairly modest budgets that I've worked on with him, which gives you a certain discipline to not you know, just to do things. Essentially, it's a reasonable way to work, and because I know with time we get a little bit of a shorthand and a lot of trust. But my experience has been much more. They do their work in making the world, and you enter it and they watch you enter it, and they watch you see and deal with the world, and then they have response to that.

To go back to what you said, Schrader, do you need to be liked by a director? Does it help you as a performer? Is that something you're often thinking about, like the relationship between the two of you.

You know what, that's a good question. I would say, not liked. But they have to be with you, they have to there has to become Actually, I don't care in a funny way because I'm an extension of them, so I don't think about that. I'm not looking back at them saying how am I doing? I'm looking forward to keep on going. It is about showing up and showing them up and applying yourself. That's it. And you know whether that's happening or not. You don't need someone to say you're doing good. Sometimes you get insecure, but even then I think you've got to suck it up and keep on going. And it's their responsibility. If what they're saying doesn't fit into their world or is disturbing what they want to see, then they've got to come to you and make an adjustment. And that's fair. But the pleasure of committing yourself to this structured thing is what it's about. That's the pleasure, that's the positive energy. That's the thing that gets you going to lose yourself in something. And when I say lose yourself, I mean be without petty concerns and really commit to doing something, accomplishing something.

Did you lose yourself on the Florida Project with Sean Baker?

I try to lose myself as much as I can. With the Florida Project. I tried to be a good hotel manager. That's it.

But the fluidity of that project, it was the first one you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, and the collaborative ways in which everyone worked, the interplay between people that in some ways the movie is about how happiness is interdependent on the people in and around you. It's true, and to me it is somewhat of a metaphor for making movies or trying to do the work that you've made.

I'm with you.

I was watching Poor Things and I thought the warmth of your role here, the tenderness that's at the heart of Poor Things. I felt that deeply in the Florida Project as well. It reminded me of that film.

Well, he's a person that takes here and that's always moving to me. I think the thing that moves me more than anything else in the movie is when someone extends themselves in a way that is you know, has at least a flavor of selflessness to it. You know that they're doing it because they need to do it. It's a natural thing. It's not transactional. They're doing it because it has to be done. And if everything that is made is some sort of expression of what our experience is being here and why we're doing here and tries to address itself to you know, what we're here for. I think the one that I keep on coming up with, and this may sound a little sweet, but we're here for each other because that's what we got. What's beyond this world, we don't know. You can have some sense of it, but you don't know. We won't know until we get there. So while we hear, the best thing we can do is be useful.

I'm just gonna sit with that for a moment.

I'm talking maybe it's delusional, I'm not saying I am. I'm talking about ambition, the ambition of being useful. You know, why aren't I building schools and underserved communities. But I also have to give a disclaimer. And no, I have to give a disclaimer because I see it in myself and I see it in other actors. You know, what sometimes is seen as a fairly pure and heart gets translated as an egocentric justification of celebration of self. It should have more contradiction and holes and funkiness to it.

I think we definitely have that here you are and have been, it seems to me to every filmmaker you've worked with, a very willing vessel for the project. I mean, I have quote after quote from Oliver Stone, Scorsese, David Lynch, all of them say over and over and over again the same thing, which is that you come to the work on time, without ego and which it doesn't seem like you agree with entirely, but a willingness to do anything in service of the project.

I think that's true because I think that's the only way to be free.

My last two questions, in doing that work where you feel most free, you said once, often when I finish a performance, I'm depressed for about five minutes afterwards, no matter how well it went, because it's never good enough. I don't know what the word is. Metaphysically, it's not good enough. You did this thing, it's gone. You're energized, but at the same time it's gone. Whether they hate it, it doesn't matter, because it's gone. If there is intensity or fury, I think it's because when a performance ends or a shot is cut, I die a little bit. I can't stand for things to end. So a performance is like a life that I flail angrily through until it's over.

Wow, I was really swinging for the fences there. When I hear that, it's common for a lot of performers, you know, after they perform, whether they're performing, it's not about the size of the venue or the reception, but after you've had that engagement that I keep on talking about, that kind of concentration. It's hard to have that in life. And when you return to life after being in this artificial, this structured situation, there's a little anxiety because in a performance, sometimes it's possible to connect the moments and connect the dots. It doesn't happen all the time, and when it does, it's special. But sometimes when you feel that it's kind of super being there, that is difficult to find in life. That's all almost impossible, almost impossible. But I think if you learn to have a taste for that, you can try to bring it to your life. What do you mean by that? Connecting the dots, being present, not falling out, not being distracted, having the kind of concentration that is aware and considers three sixty. Isn't just about serving your drive to I don't know, you know, the call and response of sense objects, you know, pleasure, I want this? You know, it's outside of that because you may adopt those kind of desires, those kind of motivations when you're performing in a fictional construct. But they don't run that deep. Yeah, they don't blind you the way that they do in life, right because it's fictional. So in a funny way, you're freer because you're not playing for keeps. You're playing you know, nobody's betten.

I suppose the only thing we can end on is an example of me connecting the dots, just one more time to say I do it. You made a film about ten years ago called Pasolini.

Yeah.

It's directed by Abel Fara. It played at the Toronto International Film Festival in twenty fourteen. I saw the film at that festival, and you and I sat down much like we're doing now, except I was twenty.

It was like in a bar.

It was in a bar.

I remember you from that time. I didn't connect that.

It was then good you stuck.

In my mind. You were young, yeah, but you were happening and you were turned on, so I like that.

I was interviewing Abel and he said, will come over here this This kid's fucking crazy.

From Abel. That's like a compliment.

Yeah.

Yeah, I had to go to therapist after that, but good on you. I took it as a compliment and I looked up that interview this morning, and the last thing I asked you about was you're about to turn sixty pretty soon. How do you feel about that? You said, I feel like I'm still twenty two years old. I'm young at heart, and you know, everything still goes I don't know what that means. It's good getting old because you see the cles, you see the rise and fall of things much easier. And also I'm never bored. But this last line is what stuck with me. Via you said the only problem with getting older as everything goes faster. I guess as we leave, I thought does that still feel true to you? And maybe more importantly, except for the lie about feeling twenty two years old, what have you done about that that is true? Does time still move faster.

Very fast, very fast? Yeah. And what that makes you do is it makes you look beyond. When you're young, you're trying to carve out your way in the world. When you've been around for a little while, you're trying to carve out your exit for the world, which hopefully won't happen for some time. But I just think it's natural as you get older and you see colleagues go away, and you get further down the line, and you know, I'm healthy, I'm working finding some of the best opportunities of my life now. I'm not going to stop anytime soon. But I think naturally you start to look beyond.

And what do you see beyond?

You can see what's beyond in the world, and I think you start to look for it there in the origin and the rise and fall of things. You know, it's basically a spiritual impulse. I guess it's to realize where you come from and where you're going to. The truth is, the second that we're born, we start to construct this character that we call ourselves. That a lot of our life we're just protecting. And I think that's what blocks us on a lot of things. And then after you see you win some, you lose some, you win some, you lose some. That's the rise and fall that I'm talking about. At the end, you're interested in returning to your relationship to everything, and that happens only when you're older, because it's useless when you're younger, because you got to you got to get there. You got to make those mistakes and have those things happen to you to propel you to that place that is you. But you don't really want to go there until you're ready. And I'm not talking about death. I'm talking about some sense of self in a healthy way, not in a you know, an accumulation of stuff weight, not a thing of power, but in fact a release. But that gets all kind of dreamy. But you know what, it's at the core of so many things of your work, everything, everything.

What I have for lunch, well, I want to say that the mistakes that you mentioned that you had to make to get to the place you're right now to produce the things you have made that have meant a great deal to me and to I'm sure many people in and the cycles that we keep talking about, the undulations however you've navigated. I'm certainly glad that you have. Thank you, and I thank you for the time as always. Sure Willem Develle. Okay, did we do it?

We did it? Are you right?

Yeah?

Yeah? Let's not be a p.

And that's our show. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you do your listening, be sure to share the show on social media. You can tag us at talk Easypod. Doing this is still the best way for new listeners to find the program. I want to give a special thanks this week to the teams at Narrative pr and Searchlight, the Academy Library, and of course our guest Willem Dafoe. You can see him in the new film Poor Things, which is now in limited release across the country. To find local show times and to get your tickets, visit our show notes at talk easypod dot com. If you want to hear other conversations with great actors, I'd recommend our talks with romy Yusef, Tom Hanks, Ethan Hawk, and Oscar Isaac.

To hear those and more Pushkin.

Podcasts listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at talk Easypod. If you want to purchase one of our mugs they come in cream or Navy, or our vinyl record with fran Lebowitz, you can do so at talk easypod dot com, slash shop. Talk easy is produced by Kroenline Reebok. Our executive producer is Jenickson Bravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Today's talk was edited by Caitlin Dryden and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chris Schenoy. Video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gaberzak, Ian Jones and Ethan Senca. I also want to thank our team at Pushkin Industries, Justin Richmond, Julia Barton, John Stars, Kerrie Brody, Eric Sandler, Jordan McMillan, Kira Posey, Tera Machado, Jason Gambrel, Justin Lang, Malcolm Gladwell, read a Coin and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to another episode of Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick. Until then, stay safe and so on.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, activists, and 
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