The_Hollywood_Reporter__February_07_2018

Dafoe’s dad was a doctor and his mom
a nurse, and because they were seldom at
home, he was raised mostly by his five sisters.
“My parents started out as Eisenhower
Republicans,” he says, “but by the time I
came around they had loosened up.” Luckily,
he thrived on the chaos. Once, when he was
8 years old, he shut himself into a closet
for two days. He wasn’t hiding or depressed.
He just wanted to feel what it was like to
be confined in a small space for a long period
of time, like the astronauts in the Gemini
rockets on the news. “Nobody in my family
noticed,” he remembers.
“He was always a performer,” says his
brother Don, 67, a transplant surgeon in
“ He got ahold of
a gorilla suit and climbed
the side of a building.”
Laguna Beach who drove up to Santa Barbara
for the film festival. “He was always doing
crazy stuff to create a stir. I remember once
when he was 10 or 12 years old, he got ahold
of a gorilla costume and climbed the side of
a building in downtown Appleton, like King
Kong.” Adds brother Richard, 65, a commercial
litigation attorney in Dallas who also attended
the Santa Barbara ceremony, “He was always
doing creative things. If he got a term paper
assignment, he’d find a way to act it out in class
instead of writing it.”
Occasionally, Dafoe’s creative spirit landed
him in hot water, like the time he borrowed
his high school’s video camera to shoot
a documentary and got expelled for making
what the principal called “pornography”
(“There was a bare bottom in it,”
Dafoe says). But he didn’t want to stick
around Appleton, anyway, so he bolted
for Milwaukee, where he camped out
on a friend’s sofa, started sitting in on
drama classes at the university and
eventually fell in with a small theater
troupe where he first began learning
4
1 From left: Dafoe with
Sheen and Tom Berenger.
2 As Max Schreck in
Shadow of the Vampire.
3 The Green Goblin in
Spider-Man.
4 On the set of The
Last Temptation of Christ
with Scorsese.
2
to act. “But I never thought acting could be a
profession,” he says. “I didn’t know anybody
that made their living in the entertainment
industry. It was just something I liked
to do, something I had fun with, a social
thing. I thought maybe I’d end up joining the
Merchant Marines or the Army.”
He started taking acting more seriously
when he came to New York in the mid-1970s.
That’s around the time he gave his name
a Dutch makeover, dropping the “ia” and
adding an “e” (although “William” is still on
his driver’s license and passport). “It’s not
like I was looking around for a stage name,”
he says, “But I knew that I didn’t want to be a
William or a Bill or a Billy.” It turned out to
be a smart move; the new cool moniker helped
him fit in with the downtown crowd he was
hanging with. Before long, he was the youngest
actor in the Wooster Group, a theater company
in an old metal stamp factory in SoHo
that mounted wacky experimental productions,
like a version of Our Town with all the
actors in blackface while sex videos played
on monitors on the stage. The critics weren’t
always kind, and money was always a problem
(Dafoe made extra bucks by doing figure
modeling for art classes), but it was here that
he met his mentor and muse — and, for a long
time, his partner. Theater director Elizabeth
LeCompte was 33 and Dafoe was 22 when they
began a relationship that lasted for nearly
three decades (their child, Jack Dafoe, is now
a 34-year-old public policy researcher) until
they parted in 2004, after Dafoe met Italian
director Giada Colagrande, 42, while shooting
The Life Aquatic in Rome. “I wasn’t looking for
anything, but I fell in love,” he says matter-offactly.
“And so my life changed.”
After the breakup, Dafoe was “excommunicated”
from the Wooster Group, where
LeCompte remains as director. But for
many years, that small theater was Dafoe’s
center of gravity, even as Hollywood beckoned.
Technically, the first film he shot, in
1980, was The Loveless, a low-budget biker
drama co-directed by Monty Montgomery
and a young first-time auteur named Kathryn
Bigelow. But that film’s release was delayed
for two years, so Dafoe’s first appearance in
movie theaters ended up being a small part
in Michael Cimino’s much more high-profile
Heaven’s Gate. Dafoe spent three months
on the set of that infamous train wreck as a
“glorified extra” before getting fired. “We
were standing on the set in full costume and
makeup and they were adjusting the lights,
and the woman next to me whispered a joke,”
he says. “I laughed too loud. Cimino whirled
around, looked at me and said, ‘Willem,
step out!’ and he sent me back to my hotel
room. An hour later, I was presented with a
plane ticket and told to go home.” He can’t
recall what the joke was but remembers “it
was something dirty.”
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
57
FEBRUARY 7, 2018