The zany delights of Willem Dafoe: Talking “Nosferatu”, his own vampire turn, and his pure joy of acting

Willem Dafoe bristles at the phrase "over the top." To the best of his recollection, he always had this reaction. The actor, 69, who started working professionally in the 1970s, feels it's a lazy phrase, especially when describing what he does on screen. Ultimately, "I don't recognize it," he tells Entertainment Weekly. "I like energetic performances. I like engaged performances. I like performances that don't lay back and make the audience come to them. I like you to put it out there."

Dafoe is one of our lifetime's masters of "putting it out there." It's evident alone in the four movies released this year that feature him: Kinds of Kindness, playing three roles, a toxic boss, a cult leader, and father; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, playing a B-list actor who becomes a ghost cop in the Afterlife; Saturday Night, channeling the former VP of Talent Relations at Saturday Night Live; and the upcoming Nosferatu, playing the off-kilter Van Helsing type, Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz.

"There's all kinds of performances, but I can't help myself. That's my energy," Dafoe continues. "I get excited. Performing is about doing things, and to be doing things in a structured environment really makes them more intense. We deserve more than an imitation of natural behavior. Film is better than that. It's not just to remind us what we know. It gives us the possibility to look beyond our experience. So, why lay back and create an environment where we're just recognizing it? Why not turn up the heat a little bit and lean into more extreme situations?"

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In the case of Nosferatu, that sentiment becomes quite literal. In a memorable sequence from the reimagining of the black-and-white silent film staple of 1922, Dafoe's Von Franz, a controversial academic and occult expert who often displays the energy of someone suffering from mercury poisoning, attempts to slay the vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) but finds a swarm of rats instead. With these live critters running amok and lines of flame igniting behind him, he rolls his head back and shouts his dialogue into the void with raucous cackling.

"What are you going to do, whisper through this scene?" Dafoe remarks, chuckling.

"I'm super lucky that Dafoe likes working with me," Nosferatu director Robert Eggers tells EW in a separate conversation. To date, the two have collaborated three times, previously on The Lighthouse (2019), for which Dafoe "offered" himself up to work with the filmmaker, and again on The Northman (2022), assuming the role of the fool, who's a bit of a freak but spouts truths. He even surpassed Anya Taylor-Joy, considered by the media to be the director's horror muse after The Witch (2015), as the most frequently used principal actor in an Eggers film.

How does Dafoe feel about the word "muse"? "Muse sounds good," he says. "I think he probably switches out his muse on each movie. I don't think it's me, but I like the idea of being a collaborator. I like the idea of being an extension of what he is trying to do."

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With Eggers' vampire tale, however, the director acknowledges there's "that extra layer" with Dafoe's role "for those who know." Dafoe previously played the Count Orlok role in a roundabout way. In Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a fictionalized account of the making of F. W. Murnau's original Nosferatu, he portrayed Max Schreck, the Russian theater performer cast to play the vampire Orlok. More than two decades later, he now plays Von Franz, who serves a similar function as the Prof. Sievers role in the Murnau film. Eggers says he spoke "a little bit" about this connection with Dafoe when casting his own adaptation.

"That was a wonderful experience," Dafoe recalls of Shadow of the Vampire. "One of the biggest takeaways was how beautiful it is to have extreme makeup. I had very heavy makeup; I was unrecognizable. You see yourself recede and the character come forward. You don't look like yourself. You don't feel like yourself. You can't move like yourself. It becomes a beautiful trigger for your imagination and an invitation to explore other behavior."

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Audiences responded quite well to Shadow of the Vampire, including Academy voters. Dafoe earned one of his four career Oscar nominations that year, which surprises him even to this day. "It was a very tiny film," he acknowledges. "It's a special pride when you get nominated for a tiny film because, obviously, it's not like you had the muscle or the enormous publicity budget to convince people [to vote]." The Academy also historically doesn't typically recognize horror films. (Clearly, there are exceptions.) Dafoe wonders how this year's awards race will shake out for Nosferatu.

"It's an incredibly powerful film," he says, recognizing the performances outside of his own, including Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, the woman psychically haunted by the vampire; Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter, Ellen's husband who's physically and psychologically tortured by Orlok; and then, of course, Skarsgård. Dafoe sees parallels between his own makeup transformation for Max Schreck-as-Orlok in Shadow of the Vampire and his Nosferatu costar's journey. "There's some great performances and beautiful displays of various craft aspects. So, it'll be interesting to see if that commonly held thought that horror is ignored in award season [holds up]," he says.

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The Oscars also previously honored Dafoe's roles with nominations for Platoon, as Sgt. Elias, capable of recognizing beauty even in war-torn Vietnam; The Florida Project, as Bobby Hicks, the kind-hearted manager at a budget motel just outside of Walt Disney World; and At Eternity's Gate, as Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Though they all feel distinct, what connects them is Dafoe's enthusiasm for the work. With each new performance, Dafoe comes across as reveling in his craft, which in turn affects the audience. He deems that observation flattering.

"Energy is important," he notes. "Sometimes people accuse me of...What do you call it? Chewing the scenery. But I think one man's meat is another man's poison. I don't worry so much about what people think. Ultimately, you just try to keep that level of...the best word really is engagement.... I'm grateful that I get to do work that I love to do. I love being on a movie set. I love performing. When I see people that are really engaged and really enjoy what they're doing, that usually is a good sign."

It's an experience he had when Eggers first described his vision for Nosferatu, a film the director had wanted to make since he was a budding filmmaker. He proposed a role to Dafoe that was half recognizable, half invented; the name Albin Eberhart Von Franz is an amalgam of Abraham Van Helsing from Bram Stoker's Dracula and Albin Grau, Murnau's set designer and producer on Nosferatu who was a practicing occultist. When Dafoe finally arrives on screen deep into the movie, he gives us a release. The audience endures horror after horror, including jump scares (something Eggers previously declined to embrace). Then Dafoe utters the line, "I've seen things that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb," and you can't help but smile amidst all this atmospheric tension.

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"He's got a great sense of irony because the gap between his vision of the world and the afterworld and certain things mystical is very far from what a lot of other people are seeing," Dafoe explains. "He recognizes that gap, but at the same time, he's trying to bring people to his point of view. So, in that gap, he recognizes great ironies. He's not pointing at it, but I think sometimes he enjoys the impossibility that these two sensibilities will never quite come together."

"Without great actors to go there, the movie would fall apart," Eggers remarks. That includes Dafoe, who's confident he will find something else to unite him with this auteur. The actor lists off the likes of Paul Schrader, Abel Ferrara, Wes Anderson, Yorgos Lanthimos, Julian Schnabel, and Martin Scorsese — directors who worked with him multiple times. "I like returning," he says, smiling.

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