Willem Dafoe was once mistaken for a sex worker while performing in a Hawaiian skirt
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Willem Dafoe has given countless unforgettable performances throughout his storied career, playing everyone from Jesus of Nazareth to the Green Goblin — but the one performance that he'll never forget came early in his career in the world of avant-garde theater.
In a recent interview with SmartLess, Dafoe told a salacious story about the time that he and his fellow performers were mistaken for strippers... and more.
Explaining that early in his career, he staged a number of experimental theater pieces with The Wooster Group in downtown Manhattan. The actor said that the troupe "needed to do something light and easy" after his former romantic partner and director, Elizabeth LeCompte, mourned the death of her father. So Dafoe and his costars did a dance piece where they "took an old Hawaiian record from the '50s — really corny, y'know, Hawaiian music — and we got some grass skirts and some leis, and someone painted a backdrop, and we invented these dances, we just made them up, and we'd do the dances to this music, you know?"
Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images Willem Dafoe
"The gag was, to make it stick, under our grass skirts, we weren't wearing anything, so it was two men and a woman, and she was also not wearing anything, and bare-breasted," the actor explained. "So we did this show, it was very popular, it was a little chamber piece, but very popular."
Dafoe and his castmates were invited to a party to perform a single number from the piece. "They offered us, like, I can't remember, like a thousand bucks apiece, and at that time, we were all really poor, [so] that was like 'wow! Yeah, we can do that.' So we went to this party, y'know… we got dressed in the toilet, and then we came out without the set, only with the music, and with our non-costumes, and we did this dance."
"[And] they started throwing singles at you," host Jason Bateman joked, suggesting that the party guests erroneously assumed the performers were strippers.
"Yeah!" Dafoe confirmed. "And at the end, people started coming up and saying, 'okay, let's go! Come with me!'" implying that the guests thought Dafoe's services might continue beyond his performance. "They thought we were, like, a strippergram and then some!"
The New York Times reviewed the piece, titled "Hula," in early 1982. "In front of a painted backdrop of red mountains, Willem Dafoe, Kate Valk and Ron Vawter pretend that they are Waikiki beach boys and girl. They are dressed in green skirts (cellophane instead of grass), leis - and nothing else," Mel Gussow wrote at the time. "Rhythmically rippling his muscles, Mr. Dafoe could be Jon Hall trying to rescue Maria Montez from lava overflow."
Dafoe can next be seen in Poor Things, costarring Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo.
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