Join us for a 90-minute career retrospective with Willem Dafoe.
Moderated by Jenelle Riley, Variety.
GUEST BIO
Academy Award® and Golden Globe® nominated actor Willem Dafoe continues to make his mark in entertainment through a myriad of challenging roles, working alongside the industry's most respected talent.
Dafoe will next be seen in Tommy Wirkola’s What Happened to Monday?, with Noomi Rapace and Glenn Close. This film is set in the future and in a world where families are limited to one child due to over population and follows a set of septuplets who must avoid being discovered by the government. Following that, he lends his voice in Adam Wingard’s Death Note with Nat Wolff. The film follows Light Turner (Wolff) who stumbles upon the ‘Death Note,’ a journal in which he can write anyone’s name and kill them at any time, in any fashion he wants. Dafoe plays the role of Ryuk, a shinigami or “death god,” who guides Light to use the Death Note and then watches chaos unfold.
Late this year, Dafoe will be seen in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project opposite Bria Vinaite, Brooklynn Prince and Valeria Cotto. The film follows a 6-year-old and her friends who are homeless, living in extended-stay motels on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida. Dafoe plays ‘Bobby,’ the manager of the motel, whose job requires him to be a handyman, an office grind, a den mother, a father figure, and a law enforcer all at the same time. Originally premiering at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival acquiring rave reviews, A24 is slated to release the film October 6, 2017. After, Dafoe has Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express, starring Jonny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer and Dame Judi Dench. Adapted from the book Agatha Christie, the film follows a lavish train ride through Europe quickly unfolds into the thrilling mystery of thirteen strangers stranded on a train. Twentieth Century Fox will release the film November 10, 2017.
Dafoe is currently in production for James Wan’s Aquaman opposite Jason Momoa and Nicole Kidman. Dafoe will be seen as ‘Nuidis Vulko,’ a key venerated academic and politician in Atlantis who comes from the generation before Aquaman’s. Exact details of Vulko’s role in the film are still being kept under wraps. Warner Brothers is slated to release the film December 21, 2018. Following, he will begin lensing for Julian Schnabel’s biopic At Eternity’s Gate, which follows the Dutch Post-Impressionist artist, Vincent Van Gough, (Dafoe) and the time he spent in Arles and Auvers-sur-Oise, France.
Most notably, Dafoe garnered critical acclaim for his Oscar®nominated supporting role in the category of Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Shadow of a Vampire. The film is a fictionalized account of F. W. Murnau’s making of the classic vampire film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens. During production, the crew begins to have disturbing suspicions about their lead actor, Max Schreck, (Dafoe), who arrives onto set in full Gothic regalia, asserting that he is indeed a vampire. He was also nominated for a Golden Globe®, Screen Actors Guild®, Critics Choice®, and won a Film Independent Spirit Award and Satellite Award on behalf of this performance. Prior to that, Dafoe also received critical acclaim for his Oscar®nominated supporting role in the category of Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Oliver Stone’s Academy Award winning Platoon playing ‘Sargent Elias,’ one of the leaders of the US infantry platoon near the Cambodian border during the Vietnam War.
In 1979, Willem Dafoe was given a small role in Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate from which he was fired. His first feature role came shortly after in Kathryn Bigelow's The Loveless. Since then, he has attained over 100 film roles in Hollywood (Andrew Stanton’s John Carter and Finding Nemo; Chris Soares’ Spider-Man; Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, Robert Rodriguez‘s Once Upon A Time In Mexico; Phillip Noyce’s Clear And Present Danger; Roger Donaldson’s White Sands; Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning; Walter Hill’s Streets Of Fire; Paul Weitz’s American Dreamz); the independent U.S. cinema (Scott Cooper’s Out of The Furnace; Josh Boone’s The Fault in Our Stars; Chris Brinker’s Bad Country; Chad Stahelski’s John Wick; Pieter Jan Brugge’s The Clearing; Steve Buscemi’s Animal Factory; Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints; Mary Harron’s American Psycho); and abroad (Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall; Theo Angelopoulos’ The Dust Of Time; Yim Ho's Pavilion Of Women; Yurek Bogayevicz's Edges Of The Lord; Wim Wenders' Faraway So Close; Nobuhiro Suwa's segment of Paris Je t'aime; Brian Gilbert's Tom & Viv;Christian Carion's Farewell; The Spierig Brothers’ Daybreakers; Daniel Nettheim's The Hunter; Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man; and the international box-office hit Mr. Bean's Holiday).
Dafoe selects projects based on the diversity of roles and opportunities to work with strong directors. His previous credits also includes works with Wes Anderson (The Life Aquatic, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox); Martin Scorsese (The Aviator, The Last Temptation Of Christ); Paul Schrader (Auto Focus, Affliction, Light Sleeper, The Walker, Adam Resurrected, Dog Eat Dog); Abel Ferrara (Pasolini, 4:44: The Last Day On Earth, Go Go Tales, New Rose Hotel); Werner Herzog (My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done); Julian Schnabel (Miral, Basquiat); Lars von Trier (Antichrist, Manderlay, and Nymphomaniac I & II); Giada Colagrande (A Woman, Before It Had A Name); Spike Lee’s Inside Man; David Cronenberg’s Existenz; David Lynch’s Wild At Heart; and William Friedkin’s To Live And Die In LA.
Outside of the big screen, Dafoe still maintains a close connection to theatre as one of the founding members of The Wooster Group, the New York based experimental theatre collective. He created and performed in all of the group's work from 1977 thru 2005, both in the U.S. and internationally. Since then, he worked with Richard Foreman in Idiot Savant at The Public Theatre (NYC) and most recently two international productions with Robert Wilson: The Life & Death of Marina Abramovic and The Old Woman opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Dafoe currently resides in New York City.
