Willem Dafoe doesn't think his “Poor Things ”doctor is a 'mad scientist'

"He actually is quite a compassionate character," the actor says of Dr. Godwin Baxter, the creator of Emma Stone's Bella Baxter.

Poor Things wears its influences on its sleeve. Adapted from the 1992 novel by Alisdair Gray, Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film begins with an eccentric doctor (Willem Dafoe’s Godwin Baxter) creating a new kind of human in the form of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). Especially since the film opens in black-and-white, this idea certainly evokes Universal’s classic Frankenstein films — especially Bride of Frankenstein, given Bella’s gender.

The combination of a curious mind and a heavily scarred face even makes Dr. Baxter look like a fusion of Dr. Victor Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster. But while Dafoe acknowledges that influence, he cautions against viewing his character as a stereotypical “mad scientist.” In fact, the actor notes some thematic connections between Dr. Baxter and Bella.

“I always get upset when people call him a mad scientist because he actually is quite a compassionate character,” Dafoe tells EW. “When he does this reanimation of the Bella character, when he transplants this brain, it's for science. It's not devilish, it's not crazy. He's trying to advance something and, in a funny way, he also gives himself hope.”

Dafoe continues, “He's a man that has had a painful past, and rather than dwell on that, he's tried to turn that into something positive. And so there are interesting parallels to Bella. In fact, they share a similar journey, in a funny way.”

Dr. Baxter’s compassion is informed by his own life experience. Throughout the film, Dr. Baxter makes frequent references to his father, who conducted “scientific” experiments on him as a child. Hence all the scarring.

“I wondered what else his father might have done to him,” hair and makeup designer Nadia Stacey tells EW. “Might his father have taken his ear off to see how it worked, and then put his ear back on? Did he open up his head to look inside? Had things not healed properly? We played around with lots of those ideas, but we also thought his father was a master surgeon, so the scars aren't messy — everything's really precise and neat. So he became this patchwork quilt of a man. But when you cast Willem Dafoe, you don't want to cover him completely.”

Dafoe, for his part, says all the prosthetics and props (which included not just facial scar tissue, but also the various devices that Dr. Baxter uses as replacements for missing organs) helped him get into the mind of such an eclectic character.

“It's always good to work with a mask,” Dafoe says, which he should know well from his time playing Norman Osborn in Spider-Man films. “It's always good to work with something where you can leave yourself behind and become something else. Certainly, the process of applying that every day was a great preparation before you go to work because you'd recede and that character would come into focus in the mirror. So it's a great tool, it's a great trigger for the imagination. And also I had those prosthetic pieces on my body, and the combination of that and the wardrobe really makes you move differently. That’s always a pleasure, when you have these tangible, physical things to work with.”

Poor Things is in theaters now.

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