A Case of Acting Outside the Box

“In a way, he’s this Byronic, early Romantic figure who both is his art and his art is him. His art is driving him, and living through him.” Is director E. Elias Merhige referring to Willem Dafoe, star of Merhige’s upcoming postmodernist, post-Expressionist horror movie “Shadow of the Vampire”? No, he’s talking about the undead character Max Schreck, whom Dafoe impersonates with such ferocious abandon that a projectionist at an early screening asked Dafoe why his name was in the credits.

What does Merhige say about Dafoe, who turns Schreck into a twitching, hand-wringing, bloodthirsty German Expressionist nightmare? “He’s sad and dangerous and vulnerable and mad. Passionate. Disoriented. He’s somebody you want to take care of, but at the same time you want to kill him. To embody all those things and pull them together is pretty extraordinary.”

Extraordinary and, for some, a little too much to handle. As any film buff knows, the real Max Schreck was the star of F.W. Murnau’s silent classic “Nosferatu” (1922), the granddaddy of vampire films, and a stage actor about whom little is known, except that “Nosferatu” killed his career.

Willem Dafoe? An actor about whom much is known and less is understood. To approach Dafoe is to wade through a swamp of shorthand and half-truths. And to climb a few flights.

“You feel like some exercise?” the voice from the intercom crackles out into the Soho street. It’s a familiar voice. You’re hoping he wants to walk somewhere for coffee. Nooooo. This is, instead, an invitation to scale the four flights to Dafoe’s Soho loft, via a contiguous staircase that Salvador Dali might have dreamed up for Alfred Hitchcock.

The actor has lived in this Manhattan neighborhood for decades, with Elizabeth LeCompte, mother of their son, Jack, 18, and director of the Wooster Group, the experimental theater troupe Dafoe joined upon arriving in New York in 1977 at age 22 and where he has spent about half his career since. In a crisply tailored suit, shirt open at the neck, longish hair swept back in a shock of brown, Dafoe concedes the interviewer’s premise, that almost everything people write, or think, about him is wrong.

For instance: Dafoe specializes in “psychotic characters.” Not true. Was the compassionate Sgt. Elias in “Platoon” a psychotic character? Was the thumbless Caravaggio in “The English Patient” a psychotic character? Was Jesus a psychotic character (in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 “The Last Temptation of Christ”)? That his portrayals are intense, or oblique or eccentric is one thing. To ignore their empathetic qualities is another. “I’m glad you’re saying it because I can’t say it,” Dafoe says. “I sound too defensive. But it always strikes me that way too. This is a key struggle. People want to be surprised, people enjoy seeing you do different characters, they enjoy seeing some sort of transformation. But everything in the business, in the selling of movies, conspires to make you crystallize yourself into one thing.”

In the category of purely psychotic, exceptions must be made for the infamous Bobby Peru of “Wild at Heart” (1990). And, of course, for Mr. Schreck. “I disagree!” Dafoe says, that generous mouth breaking into a wide grin. “He’s wonderfully complex. He’s very complex. Maaaaax. Lovely Max. No, he is a little like Bobby Peru. He’s like a force of nature. He’s got one direction.” The jugular. “The premise of Max Schreck being a vampire being passed off as a Method actor,” Dafoe says with a smile, “opens the door for lots of nice little ironies.”

Another well-worn issue surrounding Dafoe is the tension that exists between the avant-garde theater work he does with LeCompte and the films he does for Hollywood. As he sees it, there is no tension. “They do different things for me, they feed me in different ways; they feed each other in different ways. There’s a pleasure in going back and forth between the two worlds, because they have different concerns, they exercise different muscles. They’re different.

“If I had to choose one over the other? No. Why should I even entertain that, why should I think about that, when it’s not there?”

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To trace Dafoe’s twin trajectories you have to go back to Appleton, Wis., home of Joseph McCarthy, Harry Houdini and Dafoe, christened William after his father and Willem by himself. The seventh of eight children, he says he never consciously chose an actor’s life. It, instead, chose him.

“Conventional wisdom would have it, you know, that when you come from a big family, you’re near the end of the line, you have to make your way, find your identity,” Dafoe says. “So you wisecrack. You’re the joker. That’s the way you get your attention. Then suddenly you get reinforcement for it, start performing. As you get older, it shifts. But the impulse basically comes from a desire to act up . . . get attention.”

Dafoe never trained formally. He enrolled in a bachelor of fine arts acting program for a couple of semesters at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (his brothers and sisters went to Madison). The university was a commuter school where the theater program included “first-, second-generation immigrants, blue-collar kids who were the first in their family to go to school, or guys coming back on the GI Bill.” A stint with the Milwaukee-based Theater X took him on the road, “and then I left them, came to New York, fully intending to be a commercial theater actor.”

There, he saw what would eventually become the Wooster Group. “I said, ‘I want to be around these people. I don’t care what it takes.’ You know, when you’re young you can do anything. You’re not worried about a profession. You’re not thinking about next week! But I saw them developing this beautiful relationship between how they lived and what they did. They made their work pleasure and made it an extension of their lives. Which is not to say they were a commune or anything, but there was great pleasure and great investment in their work. And I thought, ‘That’s the way to go.’ ”

LeCompte and people like Ron Vawter and Spalding Gray (with whom she was living at the time) were part of what was called the Performance Group, led by Richard Schechner. But LeCompte and her approach gained increasing influence, eventually leading to the formation of the Wooster Group.

“Only two or three of the ‘60s-style experimental theater groups have hung in there,” says Linda Winer, Newsday theater critic. “And the Wooster group has done it by being this loose collection of really talented crazy people. They were doing deconstruction before most of us had heard the word. They’re true believers. And having Willem Dafoe gives them a kind of mass credibility for a kind of theater that’s usually considered extremely fringe.”

What he saw LeCompte doing, Dafoe says, was creating a landscape and a language for theater that was new and vital and reflected a new way of thinking about theater. “It wasn’t so linear, it wasn’t so psychological, it wasn’t so controlled. But it was much denser.”

So he started out doing carpentry and taking small roles, insinuating himself into the company. Did he know anything about carpentry? Dafoe looks incredulous. “Look, in the first movie I did I had to ride a motorcycle. I told them I was an old hand at this. I’d never been on one in my life. Those were the lyin’ days.” Yes, indeed. The movie was “‘The Loveless” (1983), whose directors, Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery, “saw me in a show and asked me if I wanted to be in this movie. They just gave me a script and said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ I didn’t have an agent, I didn’t know how much actors got. I negotiated my own contract, just lying through my teeth, not knowing anything. I totally just finessed it.” Phyllis Carlyle, who would become his manager, saw the film, looked him up in the phone book “because I was in the phone book in those days” and asked if he wanted to do more. He did.

What followed were “Streets of Fire” (1984), “To Live and Die in L.A.” (1985) and “Platoon’ (1986). The filmography includes “Triumph of the Spirit” (1989), “Mississippi Burning” (1988), “White Sands” (1992), “Light Sleeper” (1992), “Tom and Viv” (1994) and “Affliction” (1998). But Dafoe never severed his Wooster Group ties; during the last several seasons, he’s appeared in O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape,” and “North Atlantic,” part of the Wooster repertory.

He’ll also get to play a complex, if possibly cartoonish, character in Sam Raimi’s film version of “Spider-Man,” which starts shooting next month. Dafoe has signed on to play the Green Goblin, nemesis of Tobey Maguire in the title role.

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His most recent film previous to “Shadow of the Vampire” is the current “Animal Factory,” Steve Buscemi’s second feature as a director, a prison drama in which Dafoe plays a hardened convict who protects a vulnerable young inmate played by Edward Furlong. Its other numerous qualities aside, “Animal Factory” marks a transition of sorts for Dafoe, who at 45 is starting to play the previously unfamiliar father-type role and who seldom has done a movie in which a one-on-one male relationship is so essential to the story.

“But you’re never working on yourself for yourself,” he says. “You’re always working toward some kind of clarity through other people. They’re essential. You can’t do it by yourself. Any time you lose a certain degree of control, that’s threatening. And it’s scary. But if the partner is very good, they’ll show you a way that didn’t occur to you. Nothing makes you stronger or happier than to have a good partner in a scene. Goes without saying, I suppose.” The idea is not something Dafoe wants to let go of. “When you hear someone say, ‘Oh, so-and-so blew so-and-so off the screen,’ there’s a part of me that says, ‘There’s a problem there, that shouldn’t happen.’ Because that’s not what it’s about. It’s not only a problem for the director, but for the actor that did the blowing off the screen.”

Generosity, for anyone who’s watched him carefully, is the soul of Dafoe’s work. On “Animal Factory,” Buscemi says, Dafoe inspired “not just the cast but the crew. When we announced that he was wrapped on the picture, he got the biggest applause I have ever heard on a movie, ever. Anywhere. It just went on and on. I was so thrilled to be working with him, and to be getting the gold I was getting every single day.”

Are born actors really born that way? Asked what it was that she saw in Dafoe as an actor when he first arrived in New York, LeCompte thought about it a few moments. Then she answered.

“He had a sense of worlds, rather than just the lone ego, which is very rare with actors. A certain intellectualism isn’t rare with actors, but he’s not intellectual--he has a natural sense, almost like a filter working. And a physical presence, a way he moves in space; he has a very beautiful sense of space. And his voice was beautiful. As a director, that’s something I noticed and which is very important. And,” she says, “he’s a lovely person. A lovely person. With a very, very big emotional side that he can tap into at any time.”

Whether he taps into it on screen or stage isn’t a question--he’ll do both as long as he can. “As Keith Richards said, ‘It paaaays ta specialize,’ ” Dafoe says, mimicking the most ravaged of Rolling Stones. “I haven’t done that. And I probably never will.”

Now: If we could just stop thinking about Willem Dafoe in “The Keith Richards Story.”