Credit: Far Out / Harald Krichel / WikiPortraits Initiative
Sun 16 August 2026 0:30, UK
You may well have seen those social media videos where a random guy walks up to an obviously famous person in the street, points a phone at them and asks them what they do for a living. They’re usually quite irritating, with plenty of second-hand embarrassment, but that’s not the case in the ones featuring Willem Dafoe.
As soon as he is spotted, he bursts into a wide smile, the very definition of approachable, and has the air of someone who just absolutely loves being themselves doing what they do. It seems to be how he chooses the movies he takes on, too; no matter how strange something may seem, no matter how few people might watch it, Dafoe regularly responds with “Yep, count me in!”
And in doing so, he has turned what was already a very accomplished film career into one of the best by any actor of the past 40 years, across genres, in movies both blockbuster and arthouse, and now whenever you see him pop up in a trailer ahead of a movie release, you almost instinctively make a mental note to put it straight on your to-watch list.
The younger set will know him over the last few years thanks to his movie-stealing turn as the Green Goblin in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, a role he first played some two decades earlier, but around that film, he has done some quite brilliant, non-comic book stuff. There’s the fantastically esoteric The Lighthouse with Robert Pattinson, the multi-Oscar-winning Poor Things with Emma Stone, and my personal favourite, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project from 2017, one of the best and most affecting movies of the past ten years.
Dafoe is also forming a great partnership with one of the more interesting directors working in Hollywood, Britain’s own Robert Eggers. It began with The Lighthouse in 2019, took in The Northman and Nosferatu and will continue on New Year’s Day 2027 with the release of Werewulf, the gothic folk horror with Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the lead that has got plenty of people all excited after some particularly effective trailers.
You already know Dafoe will be superb as the hunter tracking down Taylor-Johnson’s farmer-who-becomes-a-werewolf, because that’s what he does; provides industry-leading quality as part of a supporting cast. He’s done it in over 150 movies and TV shows now since the early 1980s, and shows no signs of stopping.
Ask the man himself which was the movie that changed his life the most, and he responds with exactly that decade. He told The Talks: “That’s hard to say. Probably the first one, The Loveless, or maybe To Live and Die in LA. Obviously Platoon, but it’s a little bit too obvious. It changed a certain amount of recognition and gave me a different status for a while, but it also brought some problems. After Platoon, it was very hard to find good roles.”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
While Dafoe is fantastic as a deranged art dealer in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA from 1985, it was Oliver Stone’s Platoon the following year that really made him famous. Co-starring Tom Berenger and Charlie Sheen, it was the Vietnam War drama that pulled no punches and was a hit with critics and audiences alike, making well over $100m and racking up eight Academy Award nominations, including a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ shout for Dafoe.
The only mystery is how Dafoe hasn’t gone one better and won an Oscar in the 40 years since, despite three other nominations. Perhaps one of the five movies he’s currently got on the way, including a reuniting with Stone for the drama White Lies, will change that.
