He’s a lover, he’s a fighter, he’s a hero, he’s a monster, and sometimes he’s the star and other times he’s an unforgettable cameo. It’s hard to think of an actor with a more enviable career than Willem Dafoe, who can pull off a blockbuster with the same ease that he heads up a provocative indie. From the time of his debut in the early eighties, it seemed like an industry obsessed with pretty faces was never going to figure out what to do with this odd-looking but profoundly attractive man. But many, many films and a handful of Oscar nominations later, it appears that he has made, and will continue to make, his mark.
Dafoe, who was born to a nurse and a surgeon in Wisconsin in 1955, updated his marvellous filmography in 2025 with appearances in frequent collaborator Wes Anderson‘s The Phoenician Scheme and the family adventure The Legend of Ochi, as well as the festival selections Late Fame by Kent Jones and The Birthday Party by Miguel Ángel Jiménez. Looking back at his marvellous accomplishments, these are the ten best films I recommend for anyone wanting to get to know the meaning of his madness.
10. Fantastic Mr. Fox
Wes Anderson, 2009
Having given up chicken-thieving as a career and taken up newspaper work, Mr. Fox no longer wants to live in a hole. He moves the family to a grand oak tree, not mentioning to Mrs. Fox that the tree has the three most successful chicken farms in the world within its view. In adapting a book by Roald Dahl, Anderson, working in animation for the first time, finds the perfect balance of perspectives as Dahl’s whimsy is convincingly made his own. The story is fine-tuned towards the milquetoast characterizations, including Dafoe voicing a rat, and small-arc plot turns that made films like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums so satisfying.
9. Paris, Je t’aime
Various, 2006
Producers Claudie Ossard and Emmanuel Benbihy invited 21 directors from around the world to each create a five-minute film about love set in Paris. Each film takes place in a different neighbourhood, and the highly satisfying result is a veritable mini-film festival, a myriad of treats all for the price of one ticket. Dafoe appears in the segment by Nobuhiro Suwa set in the Place des Victoires, about a woman (Juliette Binoche) mourning the loss of her son to the point of near-madness. The film’s success would lead to a series of similar projects set in different cities (New York, Tbilisi, Rio and Berlin).
8. Spider-Man 2
Sam Raimi, 2004
It’s been two years since Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) was bitten by a radioactive spider and turned into the Manhattan superhero Spider-Man, and no matter how well he does at stopping crime, he’s having a hard time keeping up with his real-life responsibilities. He decides to throw in the towel and abandon the cowl, only to find out that the city is in great danger from being destroyed by a nuclear scientist turned madman (Alfred Molina). Raimi’s sequel to his 2002 hit is an improvement in every way, with better writing, cinematography and even more impressive visual effects, not to mention a much more interesting and challenging villain and more complex relationships between the main characters. Dafoe only appears briefly as hallucinations, but I like this movie so much better than the first one so I’m ranking it instead of the one where he’s the main villain.
7. Clear and Present Danger
Phillip Noyce, 1994
Dafoe has padded his bank account with many a role as second-banana in major blockbusters, and this is the best of them. Harrison Ford improves on his performance from Patriot Games as the out-of-his-depth CIA operative Jack Ryan, who takes a high-ranking position when his mentor and close friend (James Earl Jones) is hospitalized for terminal illness, and is left to deal with the political ramifications of the murder of a family who were close friends with the president. Fascinating twists and a slick script, plus a host of supporting performances (including Anne Archer returning as Ryan’s intelligent doctor wife) that sparkle.
6. At Eternity’s Gate
Julian Schnabel, 2018
Schnabel, whose own background in visual art has been predominant in his choice of subjects as film director, has stated that none of the previous films on the father of modern art have satisfied him. While I don’t agree with this assessment, I can say that he has put his camera where his mouth is and come up with a pensive, intelligent and beautifully photographed film easily worthy of a place next to Vincente Minnelli’s Lust For Life, the animated Loving Vincent, and Altman’s Vincent and Theo. Dafoe is superb as Vincent Van Gogh, whose doubts about himself, combined with his suffering from mental illness, make him both highly productive and wholly self-destructive, showing a depth of sympathy and beauty in his work while his actual social encounters with people are disastrous conflicts. It is to date his most recent Oscar nomination, and the only time he’s been cited in the leading category.
5. The Last Temptation of Christ
Martin Scorsese, 1988
This story of Jesus Christ (Dafoe) as written by Nikos Kazantzakis, beginning before the Bible records his adulthood, showing him a confused individual who awaits enlightenment from God before taking up his vocation as saviour of the world, then in doing so struggling between his human and his divine nature. This film is still one of the most controversially received releases of all time (including bomb threats being phoned into theatres), though the conundrum of the title, once revealed, renders the film about as blasphemous as a church hymn. The people who objected to Christ’s being tempted by a human life are the same people who usually insist on going to war to preserve and protect the very thing that is tempting him, and it’s hard to see how the sacrifice that is at the centre of Christian belief can make sense without understanding that it is a mortal and sensual life that he gave up in order to make it. Scorsese uses invigorating music and photography to give a third dimension to the kind of story that was often told in plastic ways by the likes of DeMille and Wyler, and Dafoe is terrific in the lead.
4. The Florida Project
Sean Baker, 2017
Not far from the happiest place on earth, a series of brightly painted motels service the tourists who want to visit Disney World but are on a tighter budget, a great deal of these places also inhabited by more permanent dwellers who pay their weekly rent and raise children in tight quarters. It sounds like the kind of grimy indulgence in misery that is often the result of filmmakers disguising their exploitation of the lower classes as pompous finger-wagging at the ignorant bourgeois, but the magnificence of Baker’s film is in how funny and spontaneous it is. Dafoe shines as the man who brings a strong arm and clear mind to his work but can never fully leave his heart at home, while Brooklynn Prince is a marvel of child acting as the precocious little heroine.
3. Platoon
Oliver Stone, 1986
The rigorous experiences of soldiers as seen through the eyes of a green recruit (Charlie Sheen) whose family’s money could have kept him home were it not for his desire to serve his country. Dafoe and Tom Berenger earned Oscar nominations for stealing the film right from under an undercooked performance by Sheen, playing opposing forces in the group whose Cain-and-Abel relationship provides for the film’s devastating climax. Stone’s direction was never this taut again, setting the tone for copycat Vietnam films to follow.
2. The Lighthouse
Robert Eggers, 2019
Robert Pattinson has come to work as a “wickie” for veteran lighthouse-keeper Willem Dafoe, relegated to the more arduous tasks of moving rocks and mud through pouring rain, but with a storm approaching the coast, the younger man’s already brittle mental state is thrown into a confusion of rage and fear. His elder colleagues reacts by coming down even harder on him than he already did, and what at first was a friendly bickering becomes outright conflict not helped by nocturnal visions of screaming sirens and sea serpents. Every element is brought to a perfect boiling point in this masterful experience by Eggers, who takes inspiration from Herman Melville but plugs his peaceful melancholy into an electrical socket, indulging in experimentation that dovetails perfectly with his tangible narrative.
1. The English Patient
Anthony Minghella, 1996
An Eastern European geographer working for the British government in Egypt meets a married Englishwoman (Kristin Scott Thomas) and falls in love with her, despite his being a colleague of her staid husband (Colin Firth). He relates this story many years later in a sickbed after having been burnt terribly in an airplane accident, to a kindly nurse (Juliette Binoche) who listens to his story and develops a bond with him, while she romances an Indian bomb expert (Naveen Andrews) looking for mines near her Tuscan villa. Dafoe was the only main actor ignored during awards season for this much-lauded tale, mainly because the role isn’t as ornate as the others, but he delivers a compelling performance as a visitor with secrets about our hero’s past. He gives us one of the most beautiful lines taken from Ondaatje’s gorgeous prose: “You get to the morning and the poison leaks away, doesn’t it?” One of my all-time favourites.
