'But I was more like G Gordon Liddy eating a rat.' Eating a what? It turns out that Liddy, the FBI agent jailed over the Watergate burglaries, is notorious for roasting a rat and eating it to overcome his rodent fear as a child. I liked those kind of challenges.' Like holding your breath underwater? 'Kind of,' laughs Dafoe.

'When I was a kid I was very interested in the idea of the will, finding out what you're capable of. So he opened the wardrobe door and disappeared into his own private Narnia. Manned space flight was a new thing and little Willem, like a pint-sized wannabe Major Tom, wanted to know if he had the right stuff to remain in a confined space for a long time. When Dafoe was locked in that dark closet, he wasn't so much neglected as mastering himself. Be flexible, be ready.' Not a bad mantra for a 57-year-old to have.ĭid the boy in the closet grow up into the man who would do anything not to feel so neglected again? Apparently not. 'For me the thing is not to have expectations and let them harden. A lot of actors get into this profession to be king of the world. 'But sure, actors trip themselves up where professionalism is a certain kind of method or approach that they become slave to. I'm always attracted to a strong director.' How different from the narcissistic monsters many actors become.

Why does he put out so much? 'When I give over to somebody's vision rather than have an idea of what I need to do, it takes me to places I wouldn't have got to by myself. Typical Dafoe: he gets his kit off without compunction, and more besides if he likes where the artist is coming from. Willem Dafoe in The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic, 2011. 'Anywhere but there!') David Lynch insisting he wear discoloured, deformed dentures to look more satanic in Wild at Heart skinning a wallaby in preparation for his role in The Hunter graduating from Oliver Stone's boot camp to be buff enough to play a Vietnam GI in Platoon the endearingly weird stage stuff he does with director Robert Wilson (of which more later) and not to mention his TV voiceover as Clarence, the Birds Eye polar bear. Think Lars von Trier directing Charlotte Gainsbourg to crush his testicles with a block of wood in Antichrist Madonna, playing a dominatrix, pouring hot wax over his naked body in Body of Evidence ('Not there,' said his eloquent grimace. Perhaps that early experience of neglect explains why Dafoe has so often been an obliging actor, ready to do anything to accommodate a director's fruity demands. Maybe – and it's a theory that would get me evicted from Freudian analysis 101 – the abandoned boy became the inveterate pleaser of adults. My dad was a surgeon, my mom a nurse, and they were always out working. When Willem Dafoe was a little boy in Appleton, Wisconsin, he shut himself in a closet for two days.

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