Dopo aver mosso i suoi primi passi come attore nello sperimentale Theater X di Milwaukee, nel 1977 va a New York ed entra a far parte della compagnia teatrale d'avanguardia Wooster Group. All'infausto debutto nel cinema con I cancelli del cielo di Cimino del 1981, tonfo commerciale che sembra segnare la fine del genere western, seguono alcune apparizioni in una serie di film fra cui spiccano Miriam si sveglia a mezzanotte e Strade di fuoco. L'interpretazione del falsario criminale Masters, nel riuscito Vivere e morire a Los Angeles di Friedkin, lo eleva al rango degli attori di qualità, ma è nel 1986, con il personaggio del sergente Elias in Platoon di Oliver Stone, che si fa conoscere al grande pubblico, ottenendo la nomination all'Oscar come attore non protagonista e toccando quello che resta tutt'oggi il punto più alto della sua carriera, sia in termini di riconoscimento che a livello di resa interpretativa. Nel 1988 è coprotagonista con Gene Hackman in Mississippi Burning, nel ruolo di un coraggioso e idealista agente dell'FBI, mentre Scorsese lo sceglie per L'ultima tentazione di Cristo, film interessante che qualcuno ha ingiustamente considerato blasfemo, dove impersona con credibilità un problematico e controverso Gesù. Ormai affermato, comincia a lavorare con regolarità, anche se non sempre da protagonista, con registi e in produzioni importanti: Stone lo rivuole per il suo Nato il 4 luglio e Lynch gli assegna una parte in Cuore selvaggio; nel 1993 ricopre l'inquietante ruolo di Emit Flesti in Così lontano, così vicino di Wenders e quello di John Letour in Lo spacciatore di Schrader. Degna di rilievo anche la sua presenza in Sotto il segno del pericolo di Noyce, accanto a Harrison Ford. Nel 1999 figura tra gli interpreti di eXistenZ, ultimo lavoro di Cronenberg. Riconoscibile per il suo volto ossuto, dall'espressione tormentata, a tratti illuminata da un sorriso che fa pensare a un angelo caduto, Dafoe, emancipatosi con merito dall'immagine stereotipata del cattivo che lo confinava fra i caratteristi, si segnala da tempo come uno degli attori più interessanti della sua generazione.

STRANGE is a relative term when applied to the work of Willem Dafoe, and yet when one looks at his fall schedule, it is also the word that jumps most immediately to mind.
In the art-house cinemas he and Charlotte Gainsbourg can currently be seen inflicting unspeakable violence on each other in the Lars von Trier suspense film “Antichrist.” Next, at the Public Theater, he will don a frilly 18th-century costume and lead a giant anthropomorphic duck around the stage by its genitals in Richard Foreman’s surrealist play “Idiot Savant.” After that he can be heard in Wes Anderson’s animated version of “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” providing the voice of a knife-wielding rat.
It may be convenient to classify Mr. Dafoe’s choices as strange because they defy easy categorization. The actor himself is not in any particular hurry to explain how his choices should be interpreted. “Nobody has to know what I think about what I do,” he said in his gentlemanly growl during a recent lunch in the meatpacking district. “In fact it’s very important, I think, for an actor to keep their mouth shut on some level.”
No deeper pattern emerges, either, from the body of film work he has built over the last quarter-century. Sure, he has portrayed some memorably unhinged creeps in films like “Wild at Heart” and “Spider-Man.” But that assessment does not account for his subdued performance in “Mississippi Burning,” his quiet heroism in “Platoon” or his comic turn in “Shadow of the Vampire.” And it ignores his parallel career in avant-garde theater, where his work has been even more unpredictable and unquantifiable.
Taken one at a time, each project is an example of an actor following his own idiosyncratic muse; together they have hardly anything in common except that Mr. Dafoe is in them.
In person Mr. Dafoe, a trim, sinewy man of 54, can be an intense, intimidating figure, owing mostly to a reptilian voice that can make the most banal utterances sound a little bit sinister. He is also endowed with a metamorphic face that at first appears skeletal but can communicate a spectrum of emotion with its bends and contortions. When he is deep in thought, the worry lines pile up on his forehead like sand dunes, and when he grins, his mouth appears to stretch beyond the boundaries of his face.

“He looks very much like the Batman cartoon — he looks like the Joker,” said Mr. von Trier, who previously directed Mr. Dafoe in his film “Manderlay.” “He can do strange things with his face that show he’s very much alive.”
He can also be playful and self-deprecating. Or be open and thoughtful about his work and then suddenly turn shy. Beneath all these layers is an actor who is supremely confident in the decisions he makes, yet still feels rudderless after five years away from the Wooster Group, the pioneering downtown Manhattan theater collective he helped to create.
“I’ve been looking for outlets,” Mr. Dafoe said, “and I haven’t really found something that suited me.”
Among his frequent collaborators there was no consensus about what it is exactly that he adds to their work.
Paul Schrader, who has directed Mr. Dafoe in films including “Light Sleeper” and “Auto Focus,” said after some reflection that he was the rare actor who did not need to find the redeeming qualities in his characters.
“With Willem, you can actually say, ‘This guy is such a loser,’ ” Mr. Schrader said. “And he’ll get it and say, ‘Isn’t that great?’ He’ll play a loser like a loser.”
Those earliest psychopaths that Mr. Dafoe portrayed — a gang leader in “Streets of Fire,” a ruthless counterfeiter in “To Live and Die in L.A.” — were crucial to his cinematic breakthrough in the 1980s, even if they were the stock characters an actor gets offered, he said, “if you weren’t conventionally good looking, or you don’t have a winning, chatty personality.”
In those days, Mr. Dafoe said, he was more interested in anger than equanimity, and he liked that these roles let him tap into a darker side of himself. “On some level I’m very patient and flexible,” he said. “But on another level I’m like a little kid. If I get tired or you humiliate me or you treat me wrong, I’ll bite back.”
He added that the role of the villain “suited me emotionally” because “it’s more fun; it suits my fantasies more.”
By the time his film career was taking hold, however, Mr. Dafoe already had a fully formed identity in the Wooster Group, which emerged from Richard Schechner’s Performance Group and drew its membership from the actors and artists to whom Mr. Dafoe gravitated almost immediately after he arrived in New York from Wisconsin in the 1970s.
As his movie work became more prevalent, he remained deeply involved with the group, with which he played roles from an updated version of the “Crucible” protagonist John Proctor to a living chicken heart. Beyond his work he remained inextricably linked to the company by his relationship with its director, Elizabeth LeCompte, with whom he has a son, Jack.
In 2004, however, Mr. Dafoe and Ms. LeCompte ended their relationship. Mr. Dafoe said this resulted in his being “excommunicated” from the group.
“When we separated,” he said, “I understood that on the next project, maybe she needed some time to feel a little better about me.” Instead, he said, “I haven’t heard from them.” Even when the group has staged work that Mr. Dafoe helped to create, he said, “they haven’t invited me to participate.”
(In an e-mail message Ms. LeCompte wrote, “I respect Willem Dafoe as an artist, and I respect anything he has to say about the Group and the Group’s work.”)
So Mr. Dafoe has turned to directors like Mr. von Trier (“Dogville,” “Dancer in the Dark”), who cast him in “Antichrist” after Mr. Dafoe sent him an e-mail message asking what he was working on.
In “Antichrist,” an urban couple played by Mr. Dafoe and Ms. Gainsbourg withdraw to a remote cabin in the woods. There they seek to overcome their grief at the accidental death of their young son but instead spend the retreat alternating between vigorous sex and vicious acts of torture and mutilation.
Despite the film’s often graphic renderings of these scenes — Mr. von Trier hired actors from pornographic movies as stand-ins for some moments — Mr. Dafoe saw the project as a challenge to strike the right balance between controlling himself and letting himself go. How, for example, should he play a scene where he is spoken to by the carcass of a dead fox, or where Ms. Gainsbourg drives a rod through his leg and attaches a millstone to that rod?
The answers were made up as Mr. Dafoe went along. “You just have to do what makes sense for you,” he said. “One man’s hammy overacting is another man’s passionate acting. One man’s boring, flat walk-through performance is another’s beautifully restrained performance.”
He was dismayed, however, by the reputation that “Antichrist” acquired after the Cannes Film Festival in May. Its official premiere was well received, and Ms. Gainsbourg won an acting award, but the film nonetheless became synonymous with a raucous press screening that drew boos and mocking laughs.
“It’s a hothouse environment, and they like scandal,” Mr. Dafoe said. “You see who holds the cards and what plays, what doesn’t play. Where the idiots are, where the thoughtful people are. And for the most part the idiots win. But that’s O.K.”
It may not be the most diplomatic way of expressing an urgent desire to support the work of the people he believes are truly making art. But it was that same impulse that delivered Mr. Dafoe to Mr. Foreman, the playwright and founder of the proudly nonlinear and nonconformist Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
If “Idiot Savant” (which opens at the Public on Nov. 4) is, as Mr. Foreman has vowed, his last work for the stage, it is not a last-ditch bid for mass approval. The play centers on a quasi-mystical figure called the Idiot Savant (played by Mr. Dafoe) as he and two female interlocutors (Elina Löwensohn and Alenka Kraigher) contemplate the nature of language, God and — yes — a giant duck. Their dense Socratic dialogues are punctuated with loud musical cues, booming omniscient narration and myriad other elements that Mr. Foreman knows do not endear him to traditional theatergoers.
Yet amid the following that Mr. Foreman has cultivated in what he calls “the ghetto of experimental theater in New York City,” Mr. Dafoe has been a devoted fan, dating at least to a 1985 Wooster Group production of Mr. Foreman’s play “Miss Universal Happiness.” (In that work Mr. Dafoe portrayed a character called Local Psychotic.)
Mr. Foreman said his choice of Mr. Dafoe for “Idiot Savant” was primarily “a musical thing.”
“It’s just the sound of Willem’s voice, the rhythms of his speech that I thought could be adapted to this,” he said. It helped, he said, that the actor was “up for anything.”
“I just thought he had a kind of openness and, in a good sense, a kind of naïveté that might serve this part,” Mr. Foreman said.
Mr. Dafoe, in turn, admiringly described the frizzy-haired Mr. Foreman as a “crazy professor” who hopes that his work will be appreciated by someone but does not care if it is understood by everyone. “When you’re performing, he talks about trying to find the one person that’s going to get it,” Mr. Dafoe said.
When the play ends its limited run on Dec. 13, more movie roles await Mr. Dafoe, a full complement of outsiders, loners, vampires and vampire hunters. They may not all offer him the same exploratory freedom as “Antichrist” or “Idiot Savant,” but Mr. Dafoe said these films yielded their rewards — and not just financial ones. Even Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” movies, in which Mr. Dafoe played the nefarious Green Goblin, provided him with a kind of artistic satisfaction.
“The fact that even close friends can wink at me and say, ‘Well, he does it for’ ” — he paused to fan a wad of imaginary cash in his hand — “it’s like: ‘You idiot. No, I like doing this.’ They can’t recognize the personal filmmaking in a movie like ‘Spider-Man.’ But the truth is it was a very personal film.”
Yes, he is still acting for directors well outside the mainstream, like Werner Herzog and Giada Colagrande, his wife of four years, with whom he frequently travels to Rome or the occasional film shoot in Buenos Aires. (“She’s got a lot of energy,” Mr. Dafoe said through a sigh. “So if we have a spare moment, we go.”)
But for now Mr. Dafoe seemed most excited about his role in “John Carter of Mars,” a coming adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure novels directed by Andrew Stanton (“Wall-E”).
Another boundless grin unfurled itself across Mr. Dafoe’s face as he described his character, Tars Tarkas. “I’m a Martian warrior,” he said. “Nine feet tall. Four arms. Speak the language of the green Martian people.”
Despite some obvious physical shortcomings, Mr. Dafoe was unwavering in his certainty that he was right for the part. “They’ll make me nine feet tall,” he said, “and I’ll play those scenes.”
Da The New York Times, 25 Ottobre 2009

Willem Dafoe ha avuto nomination agli Oscar, ai Golden Globe ai SAG Award e ha ricevuto il premio come miglior attore non protagonista agli Independent Spirit Award per la sua interpretazione in L’Ombra del vampiro nel 2001. I critici di New York e di Los Angeles lo hanno inoltre nominato miglior attore non protagonista per lo stesso film. È stato uno dei protagonisti di due tra i maggiori successi del box office degli ultimi anni: Spiderman di Sam Raimi (2002), Alla Ricerca di Nemo di Andrew Stanton e Lee Unkrich (2003). Lo abbiamo visto recentemente in Inside Man di Spike Lee (2006), American Dreamz di Paul Weitz (2006), Before it had a Name di Giada Colagrande con cui ha anche collaborato alla sceneggiatura (2005), Le avventure acquatiche di Steve Zissou di Wes Anderson (2004), Manderlay di Lars Von Trier (2005) e The Aviator di Martin Scorsese (2004). Tra le sue uscite prossime: Mr Bean’s Holiday e Anamorph di Henry Miller. Dafoe si è creato la propria fama interpretando ruoli con alcuni tra i registi più acclamati dalla critica di tutto il mondo: Caravaggio ne Il Paziente inglese di Anthony Minghella, il sergente Elias in Platoon di Oliver Stone, Gesù ne L’Ultima tentazione di Cristo di Martin Scorsese, Bobby Perù in Cuore selvaggio di David Lynch, il ruolo dell’ attivista per i diritti civili in Mississipi Burning di Alan Parker. Tra i lavori di Dafoe ricordiamo inoltre: Auto Focus (2002), Affliction (1997) e Lo Spacciatore (1993) tutti e tre di Paul Schrader, In Ostaggio di Pieter Jan Brugge (2004), The Reckoning di Paul McGuigan (2001), XXX2: The Next Level di Lee Tamahori (2005), Animal Factory di Steve Buscemi (2000), The Boondock Saints di Troy Duffy (1999), EXistenZ di David Cronemberg (1999), Lulu on the Bridge di Paul Auster (1998), New Rose Hotel di Abel Ferrara (1998), Pavilion of Women di Yim Ho (2000), Così lontano così vicino di Wim Wenders (1993), Speed 2 di Jan de Bont (1997) Tom & Viv di Brian Gilbert (1994), Sotto il segno del pericolo di Phllip Noyce (1994), Nato il 4 luglio di Oliver Stone (1989), Oltre la vittoria di Robert M. Young (1989), Tracce nella nebbia di Roger Donaldson (1992), Vivere e morire a Los Angeles di William Friedkin (1985), Strade di fuoco di Walter Hill (1984), The Loveless di Kathryn Bigelow e Monty Montgomery (1982). Willem Dafoe è uno dei membri fondatori del Wooster Group, gruppo di sperimentazione teatrale che ha base a New York. Ha creato il gruppo con cui lavora sia in America che nel resto del mondo sin dal 1977.