WILLEM DAFOE HAS been the bad guy in Spider-Manand Speed 2.He's popped up in Mr Bean's Holidayand xXx: State of the Union.This week he appears as Tars Tarkas, an etiolated green alien, in the science-fiction film John Carter.
However, those commercial ventures noted, it must be acknowledged that Dafoe has done a darn good job of retaining his integrity. It is closing in on 40 years – he’s a trim 56 – since he first immersed himself in the avant-garde theatre world of New York. But he still comes across as the rugged experimentalist.
A deal shorter than you might expect, his face retaining the familiar deep creases, Dafoe arrives wearing black trousers and an unaccompanied V-necked jumper. He looks set to deliver a TS Eliot monologue to a Brooklyn theatre-club audience.
One wonders if he brings the same intensity to big green aliens as he does to his less mainstream activities.“I don’t think of him as an alien,” he says in that strange, flattened voice. “All we have is our own psychology. I am approaching it with all my human psychology.”
He turns out to be an articulate fellow who enjoys engaging with the trickier questions. Mind you, if you grow up as the seventh of eight children, you will almost certainly learn to make your voice heard. It is probably too simplistic to suggest that his family background – all that fighting for attention – turned him into an actor.
“If it’s a bullshit theory then I’m bullshit,” he laughs. “Because that’s me. I was the one that could do the imitations. That’s how I stood out from that crowd. I really did become the clown.”
Dafoe was raised in Wisconsin as the son of a surgeon and a nurse. The urge to turn his domestic playacting into a career developed when he attended student productions while visiting his brothers and sisters at university. He mucked around with a local company and then bravely made his way to New York. By the late 1970s he had become a key member of the hugely influential theatre company The Wooster Group.
One can’t help but envy him. The downtown art scene of that era sounds unimaginably exciting. Punk was still bubbling. The East Village was still properly bohemian. “Maybe I was a little late for all that,” he says. “Just a little. I returned there in 1977. But it was a fantastic time. Yeah, the Brits still say they invented punk. Forget about it. Heh, heh, heh!”
So we’re not wrong to feel romantic about that scene? “No, no. I remember going to New York with $200 in my pocket. But I was lucky. I began working almost immediately. But we were poor. I went to New York with dreams of being a ‘proper actor’ and doing traditional theatre. I suddenly found these group theatres. People were putting on shows in storefronts. They were making little 8mm films. I immediately thought, f**k Broadway. This is really exciting.”
He goes on to describe a downtown that now seems as lost as the Wild West. There was only one bar in SoHo and it was for the men who still actually packed meat in the meat-packing district. Swilling around this lo-fi arts scene, Dafoe never thought much about the world of commercial movies. But he stumbled into a few 8mm experimental pieces. Then he found himself playing a biker in (future Oscar-winner) Kathryn Bigelow's hard-edged debut The Loveless.
"I had been a glorified extra in Heaven's Gateand got cut out," he says. "But The Lovelesswas my first real movie. Somebody had spotted me in the theatre. I didn't know what to do. I phoned up a friend and said: 'How much money should I ask for?' I just didn't have those ambitions."
I would guess that Oliver Stone's Platoonreally changed things for him. Released in 1986, the film reignited debate about Vietnam and secured Dafoe his first Oscar nomination. Suddenly, his name was being bandied about by powerful casting agents.
That was a breakthrough. Was it not? “I think that’s true,” he says. “But I was still at the theatre every day. So I wasn’t aware of it. I am the kind of guy who, through all my years of working, has never hired a publicist. I don’t live in LA. I am far from that world. So a lot happened, but I didn’t know much about it.”
Over a decade later, he received another Oscar nomination for playing Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire.A great deal had changed in the interim. "The first time round, I didn't even know what day they announced the nominations. The way I found out was my son's babysitter called up. Ten years later it was so different. We campaigned. There were targeted screenings. It all got so calculated. The Weinsteins really changed that game."
Dafoe's character in Platoonwas a class of secular saint. But the Hollywood machine doesn't like its heroes to look too peculiar or to speak in too eccentric a timbre. Like other serious theatre practitioners such as John Malkovich, Dafoe found himself being repeatedly offered villainous roles. By the time he came to play Jesus in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, analysts already – just two years after Platoon– argued he was being "cast against type".
“That was true,” he says. “Though it’s maybe less the case now. It was to do with my voice and with how I look. Also, when I came to New York, I’d cultivated this tough-guy image. It’s to do with being from the mid-west.”
His wife, the actor and director Giada Colagrande, greatly enjoys this particular line of argument. “She says: ‘Not again. Not the story of you coming from the favelas of Wisconsin.’ But think of this kid – not educated, but from a well-off background – going to New York and falling about three social classes. I started to identify with the rough neighbourhoods I lived in. I adopted this tough-guy thing as a mask. And that got caught up with who I was as an actor.”
Whether by accident or design, Dafoe has developed an exemplary career. Every now and then (this week for example), he appears in some class of multi-million dollar marquee picture. But he has never abandoned the theatre and he continues to turn up in odd, modestly budgeted art films. As we speak, he is taking time off from rehearsing a new experimental performance piece with the influential director Robert Wilson.
Then there are his collaborations with Lars von Trier. Taking the low road, I feel obliged to ask about the sex scenes in that director's notorious Antichrist. Body doubles were used for the shots of (cover your eyes, grandma) full penetration, but he did get very intimate indeed with Charlotte Gainsbourg.
“Well, I’m trying to be respectful to Lars, who I really admire,” he says. “But it was difficult because he forbids rehearsals. So, you’d arrive on set and we’d never have touched one another before. That is difficult. It requires patience. But it is exciting.”
It helps if you have an understanding wife. He married Colagrande, an Italian, in 2005 and they share their time between Rome and New York. She is always nice about his efforts to speak her native language, but Dafoe still modestly believes that he “sucks” at that endeavour. It all sounds frightfully glamorous. Can he still call himself a mid-westerner? “Not any more,” he says. “That’s where I come from. I am a product of that and some of it you never leave behind. Some of it is good. It keeps you rooted.” So, the hard-ass image is really just an act? “Actually, I am a sweetheart,” he laughs.
I wouldn’t argue with that.
John Carteris on general release from tomorrow
