Willem Dafoe on ‘Late Fame,’ Disappearing but Not Losing Himself in Roles, and How He Keeps in Touch with Lars von Trier

You know you’re in sure, steady hands when Willem Dafoe enters the frame. The four-time Oscar-nominated actor brings a serene gravitas to any role — whether as a painfully human Jesus in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” a grizzled lighthouse keeper going insane in “The Lighthouse,” or even as the green-screen-ensconced Green Goblin in a suite of “Spider-Man” movies. Or, of course, as a therapist appallingly violating the patient-doctor relationship in Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist.”

His latest film, “Late Fame,” is one of six the unimpeachably beloved actor has in theaters this year, including the Greek bacchanal “The Birthday Party,” Robert Eggers’ “Werwulf,” and the mountaineer drama “Tenzing.” His hard-shelled, but not compassionless, portrayal as erstwhile post-Beatnik-era writer Ed Saxberger in Kent Jones’ “Late Fame” is one of the actor’s best in a career built on bests.

While Dafoe is not an actor who dissolves body and soul into a role — and that’s by design, we are assured to know it’s his presence onscreen — the border between character and actor hasn’t been quite so blurry in years here. And he’s anchored by the sharp wit and Manhattan scene-setting of Samy Burch’s script (itself an adaptation of a posthumous novella by Arthur Schnitzler, the author of the book that became “Eyes Wide Shut”).

A one-hit wonder New York poet of the 1970s, Ed has put that part of himself in storage, now working as a mail clerk and content to shoot pool with his blue-collar buddies after punching out. But he’s drawn back into his early work when courted by a circle of aspiring writers, dilettantes, and charlatans who call themselves the Enthusiasm Society, led by the trust-funded, self-styled Soho patron-of-the-arts Meyers (Edmund Donovan). Ed is also attracted to a wounded Holly Golightly-type played by Greta Lee, an Enthusiasm Society stage performer who relies on the company of men and their largesse to pay the rent on her lower Manhattan walk-up. There’s a brilliant, hurting scene where she looks at him, post-embrace, and realizes how old he is.

At 71, Dafoe, who splits his time between New York and Rome, still feels “like a kid,” he told IndieWire, but his perfectly unfussy and relaxed turn in “Late Fame” indicates someone who’s known what it means to be the oldest person in the room, too.

Ask his co-star Donovan, 35, who’s spent a young career and long before his screen partner’s work. Especially the experimental Wooster theater group Dafoe founded in 1975, which stripped apart classic texts in the modern age with raw, physical performances. “It’s sort of the idea of American avant-garde theater, downtown theater,” Donovan told IndieWire, that defined the bold artistic milieu of New York around the same time Saxberger would’ve been writing poems.

‘Late Fame’©Magnolia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

“He’s so about the work. I don’t get the sense, looking back at all the many, many things that he’s done, that he’s like, ‘Oh no, that’s not a big enough part. I can’t do that.’ Because I don’t even think that some of these smaller roles were necessarily when he was at the beginning of his career. I think some of them were just things that he knew the filmmaker and he wanted to be a part of this thing,” said Donovan, whose earliest introduction to Dafoe was as the Green Goblin.

“He’s very relaxed. He has a sort of open-minded but easeful way about him. He’s a livewire too, though. And I don’t think you see that in the movie,” Donovan said. “That’s a part of his daily personhood on set. I mean, he’ll just start improvising songs and singing. He’s very physical. He’ll sort of dance in a moment on his own, without having been inspired to do it by anything or anyone. He’s a truly free person.”

Donovan also said Dafoe treated him like a peer, not a protégé. “I mean this in such a positive way: He’s very unsentimental. There was never a sense that he was like, ‘You know what, kid? You’re going to be alright,'” he said. “If anything, he was more inquisitive and like, ‘What’s your experience been like with this or that? Or what do you want to do?'”

That same sense of searching, as revealed in IndieWire’s wide-ranging conversation with Dafoe, is still part of his career philosophy (and even anxieties) nowadays regardless of age or experience. Below, we dig into “Late Fame,” “The Birthday Party,” his philosophies about acting, and his latest communications with Lars von Trier, who not only directed Dafoe in “Antichrist” but also “Nymphomaniac” and “The Kingdom” Season 3. Von Trier, though, has recently fallen on poor health due to Parkinson’s, but they’ve stayed in close touch.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

IndieWire: Tell me about how “Late Fame” got started: You were sitting next to Kent Jones on a plane, and it turns out you’d both been chasing the same project.

Willem Dafoe: I had seen the movie “Diane.” I knew Kent mostly from New York Film Festival and somewhat followed the things that he had done with Martin Scorsese. We weren’t close friends, but I’d seen him through the years, so we did know each other. I was trying to find something to do with Abel Ferrara, and I put out the feeler to a friend of mine, and he said, “I just read this Schnitzler novella. It’s really interesting. Here it is. Check it out.” I read it. I thought, “This is really great.” I thought, “This isn’t for Abel, but it’s great. This is a movie.”

So I was carrying it around, and then I ran into Kent, and we sat next to each other on a plane from L.A. to New York. We talked about everything under the sun, caught up. Little did we know that we each had a copy of “Late Fame” in our bag because he had just signed on to direct it, and I didn’t even know that. I was looking to find out who had the rights to “Late Fame.” Then I get back to New York, and after a couple of days, I get a call, and I hear Kent Jones is directing this thing called “Late Fame,” and he wants you to play this character. I thought, “Oh my God, you’re kidding me.” It was just one of those things.

It’s worth mentioning, I think — maybe I shouldn’t, but I can’t resist — that when I first heard it was transposed to New York present day, because it seemed like the Vienna part of it was so important, I thought, ah, that takes something away. Then of course, I read Samy Birch’s script, and then I thought, no, this is cool. This also touched on a lot of things that are in my head because I arrived basically at the same time that the character arrived in New York City. Now I’m longer in the tooth, and I look back on that time. I think about it a lot, and people ask me about it a lot, particularly young people, because there’s a romantic attraction and a nostalgia to that period in the mid-to-late ’70s and early ’80s when a lot was going on.

‘Late Fame’Magnolia Pictures

There is this emphasis lately on trying to “dissolve” into a role that can prove damaging for actors, and then that becomes a metric of success. But I don’t get that from you, whether you’re playing Pasolini or Jesus. Maybe that’s a younger thing for actors.

I want to disappear into a role, but not to lose myself. Change is happening all the time. Every time you approach something, and you’re inviting yourself to change the way you’re living or the way you see things or what you’re doing, there’s this thing called a frame, basically. You’re entering that frame, and you’ve got permission to fuck around with your life, to abandon your life and take on the way, the look, the preoccupations, et cetera, of another person. Sometimes, there can be some overlap, but it’s not necessary. You want to go to those things to give you flexibility, so you don’t get stuck in a way of being, in a way of seeing.

That’s what keeps us alive, if we don’t have our identity harden and our view of the world get small. If you remain kind of turned on and engaged, then every sky that you see every morning when you wake up is a new sky, and you can be excited and turned on. That’s the state I want to be in. I want to be turned on. I want to be eating up what’s happening. That’s what I look for.

So, disappear? Because I don’t know who that character is. I make myself available to do something. I look around, I see what the world is. I see what the director is trying to accomplish, and I try to use myself to make stuff function, make the world complete, make the world have its life. So if that’s disappearing, I guess I like disappearing, but I never lose myself because I think I approach things physically, not psychologically. So I always know it’s my body that’s doing the thing.

‘Late Fame’©Magnolia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Do you identify with Ed Saxberger? You haven’t dipped in prolificness going back to “Heaven’s Gate,” whereas this is someone where there’s a huge creative gulf between his past and present. He still thinks in poetry, but that side of himself, professionally speaking, is now on a shelf.

That’s an apt description. Yeah, my life is not his life, but there’s a line — I say it all the time in interviews because I think it’s interesting to describe where I’m at right now in my life. It’s like, I was the youngest person in every room, in every situation. It seems like forever, and then one day I woke up, and it wasn’t gradual. One day I woke up, and I was the oldest person in the room, and something shifted, and people started treating me like someone. They started seducing me into telling stories, war stories, talking about movies, telling stories about my experience, this kind of thing. It becomes very seductive. That part I related to. Even if the story was, as you said, there’s a huge gap, I realized being the guy that has this position thrust onto him that’s half-flattery, half-admiration, half-hope. You start to get puffed up, and you start to accommodate them.

It’s just like being an actor, I suppose. You give them what they need because that makes you feel whole. I understand that these guys dupe him into going back and romanticizing and thinking about finding that contact that made him want to be a poet before, which obviously he’s buried and has been at peace with. He doesn’t seem like he’s a miserable guy, but these guys and Greta’s character, they start to seduce him into returning to a feeling that he’s lost. So that feeling of being lost, I haven’t lost it. I still feel like a kid. I love what I do. I still, thank God, have some opportunities, but I see around me sometimes some older people that lose it. So these are all things that are floating around. So it’s very rich material for me because I can relate to it. It may not be my experience, but I think it expresses something that’s not an idea, not a convention. It’s something that really is happening even now.

What about channeling your own experience with younger fans into Ed’s relationship with the Enthusiasm Society? I’m sure you’re mostly recognized for things like Marvel by young people.

My relationship to younger fans is heavy on the Marvel stuff because they’re more widely seen. But also, as film sometimes seems to be dying, we have to look to the younger people, really. I have been working with younger people just because I’m getting older. Everybody, that bears out what I was talking about before. The joke’s on me because I don’t feel it, but I got to admit it. But my relationship to younger people, because they’re turned on, they’re still interested.

The worst thing is when people look back, and they think about better days, and they lament how it’s not as good as it used to be. I suppose I could do that in some ways. I’m not trying to be a sweetie and be an optimist totally, but I just don’t feel that way. I feel like things happen in waves, and things are very different now, but I get turned on by the impulses of young people now. It’s very different. They have different references. They live differently. They look at life differently, but I’m a bit of a blood sucker. I like their energy, and I like to go towards it.

Edmund Donovan in ‘Late Fame’©Magnolia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Well, they’re not jaded yet anyway.

I guess that’s it. You always look for people that are turned on, and they’re making what we do special because they’re elevating it. They’re making it, I won’t go as far to say sacred, but they’re making it special. That’s something that’s getting harder and harder to find in everybody’s life now.

You’ve moved remarkably fluidly between movies that are most likely to be studio-backed, and then more intimate movies that are harder to get made. Is there a philosophy there?

I still key off of directors, and I also key off of what comes to me. I don’t have a production company. I do check things out. I do sniff around if I see a film of a director that I really adore. I’m not opposed to reaching out to see if I can have a meeting. But generally, I go towards directors, and it kind of naturally happens, the big-small movie combination. I don’t overthink it too much. I think also your choices, if you’ve done a couple of big movies or a couple of genre movies, or you’re doing three movies in a row where you’ve got a big old beard, and you’re in period costumes, you really want to do something different. You want to mix it up so you don’t get stuck, so you don’t paint yourself into a corner.

But I’m not so much aware of the size as I am the directors and the kind of roles. Because what’s hard to understand for people sometimes is every role has a different function. Part of being in a movie is you’ve got to figure out where you serve the movie, whether you’re supposed to drive, whether you’re supposed to be a little relief, whether you’re supposed to be support. There’s all these different modes. So you’re dealing with all these considerations when you’re choosing stuff. So for example, right now I’ve got actually quite a few movies coming out. Two I would call big movies. Four are small movies, but all of them are by a loose definition “auteur movies.” So I think that kind of expresses my choices these days.

With this other movie coming out, “The Birthday Party,” you’re this billionaire who is scheming diabolically to entrap your biographer by way of his daughter, and he’s someone who has suffered a lot of loss, which is a hallmark of a lot of your roles. What attracted you to this one?

I had done a movie called “Inside,” with a Greek director named Vasilis Katsoupis. It was an interesting script, and I liked the director, but it was a little bit of a gamble because it was his first feature. He was great, and I enjoyed the experience. It’s a film that’s not for everyone, particularly if they need a clear narrative, but for people that don’t, I think it’s a really interesting movie. Part of that experience [on “Inside”] was the producer, because he was really good at helping us take a script that was a very strong script, but when we went to shoot it, there had to be lots of adjustments. He was very strong and very helpful, really supported the director. He was a guy that I liked working with. He told me he had bought this novel [“The Birthday Party”], and he described it to me, and I thought, “Oh, that’s fantastic.” But I didn’t see myself in it because it was about Greek people and international rich people. I thought, “Well, that’s not me. I’m not in there.”

Then, with time, he proposed a main role to me. Initially I thought, “Well, I’m not sure I’m right for it.” But I read it, and then he showed me the films of the director that he was proposing, that he was going to hire for this project. He was a director that I didn’t know, but I liked his films very much. Then when I met him, I was sold. So it was really a situation of people and situations. Who the character was was a little scary because I’m not sure I was right for it, but there was enough to work on and enough to go towards that I thought, “Yeah, I’m going to roll the dice on this.”

‘The Birthday Party’Courtesy Everett Collection

You are a recurring figure in the acting troupe of Wes Anderson and Robert Eggers. Anytime I talk to people about they’re starting a Wes Anderson movie, they say being on a Wes Anderson set feels like you’re in a Wes Anderson movie. Eggers similarly has a house style. For something like “Werwulf,” is it a similar experience?

Yes. Because it’s pretty full on. Stuff is not delegated. The world is complete. All of his collaborators are on board and they’re all strong. [People] aren’t running errands for him. You’re there as material. I like that. When you’re there as material and you really have something to do, this is the way I like to be.

Have you been in touch with Lars von Trier?

I’ve been in touch with him since I last worked with him. The last thing I did was “The Kingdom.” I think that’s the last thing he did. I don’t know whether I should hold back on this, but I keep in touch with him occasionally, and he’d answer immediately. The last time I wrote to him, he has not answered. I don’t think that’s significant because of health problems he’s dealing with. I think he’s declared many times that he wants to make another film.

I loved working with him. Not easy, of course, as you can imagine, but really inspiring and slippery, slippery. God knows slippery. But if you stay with him and you don’t fall off the horse, it’s really rewarding because I think he has a deep understanding of what’s great about cinema. To answer your question, I don’t know. But he’s had some health problems. That’s not big news. So I feel a little sad about it. Last time I wrote, I didn’t hear back. What can I say?

“Late Fame” opens in select theaters from Magnolia Pictures starting Friday, August 7. “The Birthday Party” from Quiver opens on Friday, August 14. Another recent Dafoe film, “The Souffleur,” is now streaming on Kino Film Collection.