I played a counterfeiter who also happened to be a painter. It was a different kind of painting, for a movie called To Live and Die in L.A. I had, but it was many, many years ago, and it was very different. Have you painted much before? Willem Dafoe Dafoe in At Eternity’s Gate, after Van Gogh cuts his ear off. I got inside his head - well, by painting, painting, painting. So, how do you get inside the head of Vincent Van Gogh? Willem Dafoe Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. We talked mostly about painting - what he had to learn to do to play Vincent Van Gogh, how Schnabel was instrumental in teaching the craft, and how learning to paint like Van Gogh is really learning how to see. I interviewed him in Manhattan the morning after the film’s North American premiere, as the closing night selection at the New York Film Festival. He’s portrayed as an outsider artist, a man sinking into depression and mania while also becoming more and more prolific - and more and more convinced that painting is his divine calling.Īt Eternity’s Gate premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, where Dafoe won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor. The Van Gogh of the film is in his waning years, and disdained by most of his peers - including, to some extent, his buddy Paul Gauguin, played by Oscar Isaac. Now Dafoe has teamed up with the painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel ( The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Basquiat) to play Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate. His role as a kindly motel manager in The Florida Project netted him his third Best Supporting Actor nomination at last year’s Oscars. And he’s appeared in movies as different as John Wick, The Boondock Saints, and The English Patient. He voiced Gill the fish (leader of the “Tank Gang”) in Finding Nemo. But he’s no stranger to mainstream fare, too: Dafoe played supervillain Norman Osborne in the 2002 reboot of Spider-Man. Willem Dafoe has had one of the most eclectic and distinguished careers in film, earning a reputation for versatility and tackling difficult characters, like Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ or the character named only as “He” in the twisted horror film Antichrist.ĭafoe has worked with scores of the most important directors in the industry, collaborating repeatedly with auteurs like Lars Von Trier, Paul Schrader, and Wes Anderson.

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