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Here is a typical day in the life<br />
of Willem Dafoe: He wakes up<br />
early, usually around 5 or 6. He<br />
meditates, has a cup of coffee and<br />
writes in his journal for a while.<br />
<strong>The</strong>n he checks his email, does<br />
some yoga and makes breakfast.<br />
If he’s prepping for a film, which<br />
he almost always is, he’ll go over<br />
his lines for a couple of hours.<br />
If he’s not, he’ll read a book, take<br />
a walk around his West Village<br />
neighborhood or — his favorite<br />
activity of all — do some laundry.<br />
1<br />
“It’s one of my great pleasures,” he says, dead<br />
serious. “I love it so much, I have to resist the<br />
urge to do a lot of hand washing when I’m in<br />
hotels. Sometimes, when I’m in a strange<br />
city, I go to laundromats. I did that in France<br />
recently — I was shooting a movie there —<br />
and it was a beautiful experience. For some<br />
reason, people are really nice to me in laundromats<br />
and I have these great encounters.<br />
Talk about fun and sexy …”<br />
Of course, what makes Dafoe different from<br />
most people — aside from enjoying laundry<br />
— is that in his life there’s really no such thing<br />
as a typical day. Every one of them is pretty<br />
unusual. Today, for instance, the 62-year-old<br />
Oscar nominee — he’s up for best supporting<br />
actor for his role in <strong>The</strong> Florida Project, A24’s<br />
$2 million slice of life about kids from lowincome<br />
families living in cheap motels near<br />
Orlando’s Disney World — lounges on a shady<br />
terrace at a hotel overlooking downtown<br />
Santa Barbara, where he’s about to take another<br />
lap around the awards season circuit as it<br />
hurtles toward the finish line. He’s dressed<br />
With Brooklynn Prince in <strong>The</strong> Florida Project.<br />
in hipster casual — black jeans, white T-shirt<br />
and a scruffy graying beard (a remnant from<br />
his recent turn as Vincent Van Gogh in Julian<br />
Schnabel’s upcoming biopic, At Eternity’s Gate)<br />
— but in a few hours he’ll spruce himself up,<br />
slip into a suit and step onto a stage to accept<br />
the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Vanguard<br />
Award, honoring what the program calls his<br />
“unique contributions to film.”<br />
In Dafoe’s case, unique is putting it mildly.<br />
He has played everybody from Jesus (in Martin<br />
Scorsese’s <strong>The</strong> Last Temptation of Christ) to<br />
a tropical fish (in Finding Nemo). He shared a<br />
foxhole with Charlie Sheen in Oliver Stone’s<br />
1986 Vietnam War epic Platoon (which got<br />
him his first Oscar nomination), wore 6-inchlong<br />
fingernails and a prosthetic pointy head<br />
to play silent film star Max Schreck in 2000’s<br />
Shadow of the Vampire (which got him his<br />
second) and zoomed around New York on a<br />
flying hoverboard as the Green Goblin in<br />
2002’s Spider-Man (and its two sequels). And<br />
that’s just scratching the surface of his résumé<br />
— there’s also his lesser-applauded performances<br />
in 1993’s Body of Evidence (in which<br />
Madonna dripped hot wax onto his naked<br />
body) and in Lars von Trier’s 2009 drama<br />
Antichrist (in which Charlotte Gainsbourg<br />
crushed his testicles), along with a slew of<br />
other roles big, small and occasionally completely<br />
overlooked. Over the past 37 years,<br />
Dafoe has racked up credits on more than 100<br />
films, churning out two, three or sometimes<br />
even four or more a year (last year, he did six,<br />
a personal best, plus voiceover narrations on<br />
two documentaries).<br />
But here’s the thing about Willem Dafoe.<br />
Despite his prodigious output and nearubiquitous<br />
onscreen presence during the past<br />
four decades, he’s never quite popped as a<br />
full-fledged movie star. He’s gotten plenty of<br />
nominations, and the critics adore him. But<br />
nobody gossips about him. Photographers<br />
3<br />
don’t camp outside his home (or even know<br />
where it is). Fans let him wash his underpants<br />
in peace at laundromats. Dafoe insists<br />
he doesn’t want to be a bigger star than he<br />
already is and prefers that nobody know about<br />
his offscreen life. He says it makes it easier to<br />
“disappear into roles.”<br />
Still, disappearing isn’t exactly a winning<br />
strategy when you’re up for an Academy Award.<br />
So he slouches into his chair on his hotel terrace,<br />
gives his gray beard a couple of tugs and,<br />
for a few of hours anyway, lets a stranger rummage<br />
in his laundry bag.<br />
FOR STARTERS, HIS REAL NAME IS NOT WILLEM.<br />
It’s William. As a teenager in Appleton,<br />
Wisconsin, he was called Bill, or sometimes<br />
Billy, and there was a period during his early<br />
childhood when his older brothers teased him<br />
with the nickname “Bleeblob” (for reasons<br />
no family member will reveal but which they<br />
hint are hugely embarrassing).<br />
He was the seventh of eight children, all<br />
crammed into an overstuffed colonial where<br />
there was almost zero adult supervision.<br />
PREVIOUS SPREAD: PROP STYLING BY KYLE SCHUNEMAN AT THE REX AGENCY. GROOMING BY SONIA LEE FOR ALBA1913 AT EXCLUSIVE ARTISTS. THIS SPREAD: FLORIDA: COURTESY OF A24. PLATOON:<br />
ORION PICTURES/PHOTOFEST. SHADOW: LIONSGATE FILMS/PHOTOFEST. CHRIST: UNIVERSAL PICTURES/PHOTOFEST. SPIDER-MAN: COLUMBIA PICTURES/SONY PICTURES/PHOTOFEST.<br />
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER<br />
56<br />
FEBRUARY 7, <strong>2018</strong>