The Art of Surrender

Four decades into his career, Willem Dafoe is more curious about his craft than ever.

-  Matt Zoller Seitz

FROM HIS EARLIEST credited movie appearance in Kathryn Bigelow's 1982 biker drama, The Loveless, through his current role in Robert Eggers's horror epic, Nosferatu, Willem Dafoe has never been one of those "I know that guy!" character actors whose name you have to look up. His slender, angular face is unmistakable. Ditto his gravelly tenor voice, one he's applied to everything from the enveloping kindness of Jesus and the existential self-awareness of a Vietnam War soldier to the tormented genius of Vincent van Gogh and the chaotic evil of the Green Goblin. Calling from Rome, where he lives part time, Dafoe, 69, spoke extemporaneously about the theory and practice of creative work with a plainspoken eloquence that's rare.

You’re in a unique position, having played a version of Nosferatu in one film, E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire, and the man hunting him in Nosferatu. How would you compare the experiences?

You’re dealing broadly with the same source material, but the impulses are very different. And the nature of being an actor is you do one thing and then you clean it out of your system and get ready to do another, so I have a lot of difficulty putting those two things together. I’m a little in denial! Doing projects, the world’s got to fall away. It’s like falling in love. You can’t be with someone and still be all about your past relationships.

What’s the attraction to Eggers’s work for you? You’ve also been in The Northman and The Lighthouse.