Willem Dafoe on Nosferatu: ‘We’re thinking about death all the time’

When I meet Willem Dafoe on Zoom to discuss his latest film Nosferatu, we move quickly to mortality.

The four-time Oscar-nominated actor talks to me for Radio 4’s Today program about Robert Eggers’ remake of the 1922 silent film of the same name, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Nosferatu is a terrifying vampire story inspired by a haunted young woman named Ellen, played by Lily-Rose Depp.

The story that unfolds involves a lot of death. As far as creatures that feed on human blood are concerned, this is pretty standard. But Dafoe, who plays a vampire-hunting professor in the film, also tells me in real life that “we think about death all the time”.

For him, this is one explanation for the popularity of vampire stories.

Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula has been adapted numerous times, and vampires are usually never far from our screens.

Dafoe rationalizes the enduring appeal of the subgenre. Thus: “It’s a very interesting suggestion that the undead meet the living, and it becomes a meditation on the dark side of things versus the light”.

Even if we don’t know it, he thinks, we all always deal with these kinds of conflicts in some form.

An interview with Dafoe is never dull. He’s a thoughtful and intelligent actor, who for the best part of 50 years has mixed Hollywood blockbusters (the Spider-Man films, John Wick, Born on the Fourth of July) with the art-house films he enjoyed. are

He dropped out of university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to join an experimental theater company, but, since those early days, his hard work ethic and strong appeal have seen him in more than 130 films. His first film, Heaven’s Gate, was in 1980. Seven years later, he received his first Oscar nomination for the Vietnam War film Platoon.

Defoe was crucified as Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ and had his ear cut off as Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate. He spent six hours a day in a prosthetic makeup chair to become an alienated scientist in Poor Things, and has even been a vampire version of himself in Vampire’s Shadow.

While FW Murnau’s original 1922 silent film Embarking on some early special effects, including superimposing an image of Nosferatu on the ship to create an eerie ghostly aura, Eggers goes for a grounded work grounded in history and reality.

There were 2000 real live mice on set.

That’s perfect for Dafoe, who tells me he doesn’t like working too much with computer-generated imagery (green screen and other visual effects that have become integral to filmmaking).

“You need to have the authority to pretend, and with technology, that’s lost”.

Don’t expect well-trodden vampire movie fare in this Nosferatu. Count Orlok doesn’t have the shapely teeth we’re used to. This vampire is no gentle seductress in a high-collared black cloak.

Eggers wanted to “go back to a time when people actually believed in vampires,” says Defoe. To do this, “he went for a very folk-based vampire”.

“That’s why this Orlok in the film is so different from what we’ve ever seen before,” believes the actor.

The film is packed with talent popular with Gen Z (Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin). The cast – and the status of the 1922 original in the film firmament – ​​meant that Eggers’ film had already gained a cult-like following before its release.

In America, it was Christmas Day. I asked if Dafoe thought a blood-sucking, sickly creature and a horror film set in a 19th-century German town were the perfect antidote to a day of family festivities.

He pointed to the “shadow side” of these occasions, “a time when some people fall into depression because they are out of that happiness”.

It is true that his film work presents both sides – the joy and pain of life, the extremes of being human and everything in between.

He tells me that if you don’t recognize that life has a dark side, “you’re going to fall for it someday”.

As I look at her on the computer screen, it’s impossible to see how expressive her face is – a face that could be carved from the ground.

He tells me that he realized it when he started posing on the red carpet.

“Man, they get some ugly pictures of me. They get some weird pictures and they get some good pictures.”

He put it on his face with the “limit”.

“I never think about my face,” he continues. “If I ever do, it’s really just to tell him to calm down.”