‘We’re considering death all the time’

When I meet Willem Dafoe on Zoom to discuss his latest movie Nosferatu, we get on to mortality fast.

The four-time Oscar-nominated actor is talking to me for Radio 4’s Today programme about Robert Eggers’ remake of the 1922 silent film of the same name, which was an unauthorised adapatation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Nosferatu is the tale of a terrifying vampire who is infatuated with a haunted young woman called Ellen, played by Lily-Rose Depp.

The story that unfolds involves a lot of death. Where creatures that feed on human blood are concerned, that’s pretty standard. But Dafoe, who plays a vampire-hunting professor of the occult in the film, tells me in real life too “we’re all somewhere considering death all the time”.

For him, that’s one explanation for the popularity of vampire stories.

Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula has been adapted numerous times, and vampires in general are never far from our screens.

Dafoe rationalises the enduring appeal of the subgenre like this: “It’s a very interesting proposition to have the undead visit the living, and it becomes something of a meditation of the dark side of things versus the light”.

Even if we don’t know it, he muses, all of us are always addressing this type of conflict in some form.

An interview with Dafoe is never dull; he’s a thoughtful and intelligent actor, who, for the best part of 50 years, has combined big Hollywood successes (Spiderman movies, John Wick, Born on the Fourth of July) with the arthouse films he relishes.

He dropped out of university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to join an experimental theatre company but, since those early days, his voracious work ethic and intense appeal as perhaps the greatest living character actor have seen him in more than 130 films. His debut, Heaven’s Gate, was in 1980. Seven years later, he was first nominated for an Oscar for the Vietnam war film Platoon.

Dafoe was crucified as Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ and cut off his ear as Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate. He spent six hours a day in the prosthetics make-up chair to morph into a reclusive scientist in Poor Things, and he has even been a version of a vampire himself, in Shadow of the Vampire.

While the original 1922 silent movie by F.W. Murnau pioneered some early special effects, including superimposing the image of Nosferatu on to a ship to create a frightening ghostly glow, Eggers goes for an earthy take, grounded in history and reality.

There were 2,000 real live rats on set.

It’s perfect for Dafoe, who tells me he doesn’t like to work too much with computer-generated imagery (the green screen and other visual effects that have become integral to filmmaking).

“You need to earn the authority to pretend, and through the technology, that gets lost”.

Don’t expect well-trodden vampire movie fare in this Nosferatu. Count Orlok doesn’t have the symmetrical fanged teeth we’re used to. This vampire isn’t a suave seducer in a high-collared black cloak.

Dafoe says Eggers wanted to get back to “a time when people actually believed in vampires”. To do this, “he went for a much more folk-based vampire”.

The actor believes this is “why this Orlok in the movie is so very different to anything we’ve ever seen before”.

The film is packed with talent popular with Gen Z (Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin). The cast – and the status of the 1922 original in the film firmament – means Eggers’ movie had achieved a cult-like following even before its release.

In the US, that was on Christmas Day. I asked whether Dafoe thought a movie about a bloodsucking, diseased creature and the horror he unleashes on a 19th Century German town was the perfect antidote to a day of family festivities.

He pointed to “the shadow side” of these occasions, “a time when some people fall into depression because they fall out of that happiness”.

It’s true that his film work offers up both sides – the joy and the pain of life, the extremes of being human and everything in-between.

He tells me that if you don’t recognise there is a shadow side to life, “you’re going to become a victim of it some day”.

As I look at him on the computer screen, it’s impossible not to reflect on how expressive his face is – a face that could be carved from the earth.

He tells me he only realised it when he started being photographed on the red carpet.

“Man, they get some ugly pictures of me. They get some grotesque pictures and they get some nice pictures”.

He puts that down to his face having “range”.

“I never think about my face,” he goes on. “If I ever do, it’s really just to tell it to calm down”.