Aside from the fact that he once went ice fishing with musician John Lurie for the offbeat outdoors series “Fishing With John,” Willem Dafoe is probably the last actor one would expect to reveal his Wisconsin roots in public.
Rail thin, the 45-year-old native of Appleton doesn’t look as if he has ever seen the business end of a bratwurst, let alone devoured one at a tailgate party outside Lambeau Field on a blustery Sunday afternoon.
Nonetheless, it doesn’t take much urging for Dafoe — who so wonderfully plays Max Schreck in E. Elias Merhige’s creepy-funny “Shadow of the Vampire,” which opens Friday — to turn back the clock and recall growing up in central Wisconsin, with a fellow cheesehead.
Sitting in the lobby of the tony L’Ermitage Hotel last week, the Golden Globe nominee chuckled out loud as he recalled the halcyon days of “teen bars,” drinking ginger brandy and crashing on a friend’s couch, in Milwaukee, after taking an early exit from high school.
“My son’s 18, now,” says Dafoe, between sips of his sparkling water. “He’s grown up in Manhattan, and traveled all over the world with me and the Wooster Group [the New York avant-garde theater group]. But we’ve never been back to Wisconsin, and he doesn’t know the Midwest at all. My family doesn’t live there anymore, but I guess there’s a part of me that wants to go back.”
“Shadow of the Vampire” is a long way from Wisconsin. In the film, which depicts the production of the first great vampire picture, “Nosferatu,” in 1922, Dafoe practically disappears in the role of the German actor, Schreck.
John Malkovich does an equally convincing turn as director F.W. Murnau, whose inventive use of light and shadows is still copied.
“You have this very funny conceit at the center of the story, with this prima-donna, perfectionist director, who’s using a vampire to play a vampire . . . and passing him off as a Method actor,” says Dafoe, who was encouraged to accept the part by first-time producer Nicolas Cage. “I liked how Elias talked about Murnau’s camera work, and how he wanted to iris down [the lens] . . . how he was going to do color changes and cross-cut between our footage and the original. So, that was a real challenge that rooted the experiment.”
What’s really fun to watch is how deeply Dafoe inhabits the Schreck/Dracula character, and physically seems to become both at once. His performance ought to be a slam-dunk for an Oscar nomination.
“As far as preparation, I had a model in the original, and that was exciting,” Dafoe says. “I was starting from a place of imitation, and I had the accent, which helped me know where to place the voice. So, there wasn’t much in the way of preparation I could do, except head research and looking at films, until I got into makeup.”
While filming in Luxembourg, Dafoe elected to not shrink away from the rest of the cast and a find a dungeon in which to pass time. That would have meant taking the Method to its maddest conclusion.
“No, you only do what you need to do,” he says, with a familiar gap-toothed smile. “The garment that Schreck wears is very tight. I’m pretty lean, but to pinch in my waist, they made me wear a corset.
“They put padding on my back to give me a stiff quality, and, of course, the fingernails added another dimension.”
As Dafoe continues his Wisconsin reminiscence, you get the distinct feeling he couldn’t get out of Wisconsin fast enough.
“I left high school early, and I just wanted to get out of town,” said Dafoe, who, legend has it, was suspended after producing a risque video as a school project. “I moved to Milwaukee, where I stayed with a friend who lived near the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I auditioned for a part in a play with Theater X, and after I got it, I thought, `This is cool.'”
In the ’70s and ’80s, Theater X was to Milwaukee what Steppenwolf and Remains would be to Chicago. Dafoe, who didn’t find UWM’s theater department particularly stimulating, was a perfect fit for the hip and consistently innovative company, at least in the short run.
“I was very ambitious, and, for various reasons, I knew my time was up at Theater X,” says Dafoe, the second-youngest of eight children. “It was a combination of ambition and wanting to start making a living by acting. I wanted to go to Mecca.”
So, in 1977, after reading up on artists such as Robert Wilson and theater groups such as the Progressive Theater and Wooster Group, Dafoe made the pilgrimage to New York.
“What they were doing sounded fascinating, and very romantic, although another part of me wanted to be a commercial theater actor,” Dafoe says. “When I got to New York, I started at the Wooster Group doing carpentry and small roles. Then I saw the work of Elizabeth LeCompte, and that was it. She’s hooked me ever since.”
In fact, both artists live and work together in New York and are the parents of 18-year-old Jack.
“We’re a company of artists who make theater work, and I’m one of the few actors in the group,” he says. “Most of the others have come to it from other disciplines . . . painting, photography, dance . . . and we come together around a particular work.”
When asked to compare the still very active Wooster Group to Steppenwolf, which produced his co-star in “Shadow of the Vampire,” Malkovich, Dafoe says: “Steppenwolf clearly is a company of actors that often does challenging staging of plays, where we do original work. Over the years, we’ve developed a language where we will use video, and various precise dance and sound scores. Technologically, it’s very complicated.”
Besides Dafoe and LeCompte, the Soho-based group’s members include Spalding Gray, Peyton Smith and Kate Valk. It has toured widely in the U.S. and Europe, as well as stops in Asia, Australia, Canada and South America.
In the past 15 years, Dafoe has also found time to appear in more than 40 films, including memorable roles in “To Live and Die in L.A.,” “Mississippi Burning,” “Born on the 4th of July,” “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “Wild at Heart,” “Light Sleeper,” “Tom & Viv,” “The English Patient” and “Affliction.” In 1986, his portrayal of Sgt. Elias, in “Platoon,” earned him an Oscar nomination.
Dafoe’s performance in “Shadow of the Vampire” is earning accolades, but he deserves to be lauded, as well, for his emotional portrayal of a hardened convict in Steve Buscemi’s largely unseen gem, “Animal Factory.”
“It’s very simple . . . a prison movie, but it’s very rooted,” he says. “It’s kind of out-of-time, not really hip or sensational. It’s a love story.
“[My character’s] hard core and heavy, but he’s generous. He’s really trying to do something that’s difficult” by protecting, educating and keeping his hands off a youthful newcomer, played by Edward Furlong.
Next up for Dafoe is a choice part in “Spider-Man,” a project that’s already generating reams of gossip on film-geek sites on the Internet.
Like everyone else in Hollywood, director Sam Raimi and the rest of the team behind “Spider-Man” are racing the clock against a spring strike deadline. In the long-anticipated project, Dafoe will play Green Goblin, nemesis of the Stan Lee superhero, portrayed by Tobey Maguire.
Ironically, he inherited the assignment from Malkovich, who was targeted for the role but couldn’t come to terms with Columbia Pictures.
