After seeing him onstage, Bigelow called the actor to ask if he wanted to be in a film. “I was still in the phone book then,” Dafoe says today, over Zoom from his home in central Rome. “I had to call up friends to find out what to ask for as a salary. I had no idea – I had no representation. My identity was totally as a downtown theatre actor living hand to mouth.” Bigelow cast him as a delinquent, leather-clad antihero in The Loveless, the tale of a nihilistic biker gang who ride into a Georgia backwater and set fire to its simmering tensions. It became Bigelow’s debut film (co-directed with Monty Montgomery), Dafoe’s first starring role, and today an artful cult oddity that makes one thing overwhelmingly clear: whether he’s dodging a shotgun or pouring ketchup over congealed scrambled eggs, Dafoe’s screen presence has been intact from the start.
Even over an imperfect Zoom connection it’s easy to see how journalists get tangled up describing his face, its angles and hollows and meme-generating expressiveness: “a demiurge as rendered by a cubist” (the New York Times); “the pallidly beautiful embodiment of pure evil” (the Village Voice); “the boy next door, if you live next door to a mausoleum” (that was Dafoe himself). None of those descriptions captures his amiable charm in interviews – and as singular as he looks, in the four decades since his debut, the 66-year-old has carved one of the most versatile careers in cinema, uprooting his audience’s expectations again and again. His staggering 120-plus roles to date have encompassed oddball detectives, drug lords and unhinged hitmen, a giant alien and a manga god of death, Pier Paolo Pasolini and TS Eliot, a tropical fish and Jesus Christ. Dafoe’s versatility shows not just in his chameleonic powers, but his willingness to take a gamble and work outside his comfort zone. “I’m always nervous on my first day, but that’s good news,” he says in the ridged, textured voice that has become as distinctive as his elastic features. “It motivates you, fear. It’s what keeps you curious, keeps you trying to find new ways. If you accept fear, that’s a good practice for an actor to have – it’s a good practice for a person to have. You get used to being a little off balance. I don’t know whether I enjoy it – I’m like anyone, I like to be lazy and comfortable. But you know, that can kill you too.”
“Comfortable” is not a word often associated with Dafoe’s choices, but it might be a good description of Appleton, Wisconsin, the small paper-mill town he grew up in, a hundred miles north of Milwaukee. Pre
