Role Recall: Willem Dafoe Looks Back at 'Platoon,' 'Spider-Man,' 'Finding Nemo' ('I Never Thought I'd Be a Talking Fish')
From Wild at Heart to Antichrist, Willem Dafoe has never shied away from outlandish characters or situations. And with his latest film, Dog Eat Dog, the veteran character actor ventures into extreme territory once again. Opening in New York and Los Angeles on Nov. 4 before expanding to more theaters and video-on-demand on Nov. 11, the Paul Schrader-directed crime drama casts Dafoe as Mad Dog, a trigger-happy psycho killer who teams up with two other crooks, Troy (Nicolas Cage) and Diesel (Christopher Matthew Cook), for a lucrative kidnapping scheme that goes horribly wrong.
“We basically have a brutal, transgressive movie, but the tone of it is very comic,” Dafoe tells Yahoo Movies. “Mad Dog is a guy that’s brutal, but at the same time he’s so needy and vulnerable.” Watch Dafoe’s full “Role Recall” clip above for more of the actor’s insights into some of the big personalities he’s played over the years; read on to preview some of the choice memories he shared with us.
Platoon (1986)
Celebrating its 30th anniversary this December, Oliver Stone’s semi-autobiographical account of his tour of duty in Vietnam remains one of the all-time great war films. Dafoe became the symbol of the Best Picture-winning film via the classic poster image of his Sgt. Gordon Elias (who is betrayed by his superior officer and killed on the battlefield) throwing his arms up to the sky. As Dafoe tells it, though, there’s a practical reason for Elias to be making that gesture. “It’s a purely physical thing…the helicopter was up there, and you want to reach for it,” he says. “I’ve heard people say that Oliver Stone took that [image] from a war photo, but it’s not true.”
Spider-Man (2002)
Though his costume didn’t earn high marks, Dafoe’s sly performance as the Green Goblin makes him a formidable opponent for Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man in the wall crawler’s first big-screen adventure. His standout scene comes when he acts opposite himself, playing both sides of the villain’s personality. “The task of playing a scene with yourself isn’t new, but to try and do it in one take was a lot of fun,” Dafoe tells us. “Sam Raimi gave me Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and said, ‘Read this before you do the scene.’ It was helpful.”
Finding Nemo (2003)
“I never thought I’d be a talking fish,” Dafoe jokes about his part in one of Pixar’s most popular movies. But the actor says he had a blast recording his role as Gill, the scarred Moorish idol that takes lost little Nemo under his fin. “You’d sit with [director Andrew Stanton] in a recording studio and just riff.” No wonder he agreed to reprise the role for a brief cameo in this summer’s box office hit, Finding Dory.
