While directors will often work with a wide range of actors throughout their careers, the very best and most beloved in the industry often have one or more stars who are among their regular collaborators.Martin Scorsese most notably has Robert De Niro, Christopher Nolan has Cillian Murphy, and Wes Anderson has Bill Murray and many more. For maestro of the macabre Robert Eggers, that actor who’s on the same wavelength is undoubtedly Willem Dafoe. The pair have found success together in The Lighthouse, The Northman, and most recently, Nosferatu, and are again united on their fourth straight feature, Werwulf.
Releasing on December 25, Werwulf will see Dafoe playing a hunter taking aim at a monstrous beast stalking the lands of 13th-century England. Aaron Taylor-Johnson leads the film as a cursed farmer who is just trying to protect his family when myths of lycanthropy turn into horrifying reality, setting the stage for a gothic horror monster movie unfolding across the foggy countryside. Eggers has developed a certain folk-tinged style that Dafoe has gotten to see take shape and improve over the past eight years, and yet he never ceases to amaze the veteran actor. In an interview with Collider’s Aidan Kelley for his new films Late Fame and The Birthday Party, he opened up about what he appreciates most about working with Eggers and how that applies in his latest chilling effort.
Dafoe has seen just about everything in his career at this point, earning four Oscar nominations, starring as the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi‘s Spider-Man, standing out in classics like To Live and Die in LA and Platoon, and taking part in arthouse films like At Eternity’s Gate. Part of what impresses him about Eggers is that, to put it simply, “he’s a world maker.” He appreciates the effort the director puts into every aspect of making his fictional realities and testing his actors.
“He gets better and better. He’s just very committed. He’s smart. He knows his passions. He knows his limitations. He knows what he loves, and he knows actors. He was an actor. I love working with him because he gives me fun things to do, and he knows how to punch my buttons, and he’s a world maker, you know? And that’s what you want from a director. You want him to make the world, so when you enter that world, the world speaks to you. And if a great part of acting is reacting, that world tells you what to do, and you do it. It’s always in the doing — the quality of the doing, the authenticity of the doing, and as we know, he’s a nut about research and all that. It’s an ideal situation. I really love working with him.”
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Dafoe Shares Why He First Wanted to Work With Eggers After ‘The Witch’
Dafoe went one step further, calling Eggers a “demanding” director who truly lives in the worlds he creates. He points to the research Eggers puts in as both a writer and a filmmaker as critical to getting actors to join him in those realities, whether that be by drawing from the Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy for The Lighthouse or referencing a multitude of Old Norse sagas and historical experts for The Northman. Even before working together, it was seeing his feature debut, The Witch, that spurred Dafoe to first reach out and learn about his process.
“But one thing that he does, that is the reason why I sought him out: I saw The Witch, and then I asked for a meeting with him, and then I’ve worked with him, I guess, four times now. A lot of particular period movies or elevated movies that aren’t naturalistic family drama, these sorts of things, he makes it so easy to enter the world because he doesn’t show. Like a good actor, he inhabits it. He creates things, not to tell you where you are, but because he wants to be there. He has such love for the material and gives you beautiful research that really makes you learn things and puts you in another head. So, that really makes a space. Once you learn those things, you want to pursue them, and that’s the road to inhabiting something. Because once you learn something, you become a different person, and that different person then becomes available to pretend to be this character. So, it’s a growth process. It’s a game.”
More than anything, Dafoe finds Eggers “fun to work with, and just committed and strong,” finding admiration for how totally he gives himself to his work. “He has collaborators that become extensions of him,” the actor continued. Perhaps what most impresses him is how in-tune the filmmaker is with all the people involved in bringing his projects to life from the bottom to the top. “There’s such understanding and such complicity that he doesn’t delegate anything. He’s everywhere, but he’s everywhere with the collaboration of a team. It’s a beautiful thing to work with him. Not always easy. It’s not a character thing. He just doesn’t sign things; he experiences them.”
Everything that makes Eggers such a special collaborator is translated into Werwulf, according to Dafoe. “For example, in the case of Werwulf, we’ve got a very, very full-on movie, and I think it’s going to be very beautiful,” he shared. “I haven’t seen it yet completely, but I have done some ADR, and just some of the visuals and some of the short little clips that I saw are just stunning. Stunning. Otherworldly.” He’s built up so much confidence in the director that he doesn’t have to see the finished project to believe it’ll be something worthy of the same acclaim that The Lighthouse and Nosferatu earned before it. It’s become genuinely hard for him not to root for such a kindred creative spirit. “I’m a cheerleader. What can I say?” he concluded with a laugh.
Dafoe Is Kicking Off August With Two New Films
Before the beloved actor scours the English countryside, he has two new movies releasing in theaters this month, starting with Late Fame on Friday, August 7. Directed by Kent Jones and penned by May December and Coyote v. Acme scribe Samy Burch, based on a posthumously published novella by famed author Arthur Schnitzler, the story casts Dafoe as an author who, years after his poetry collection is released, suddenly finds himself the subject of newfound attention and adoration by fellow artists. He feels his own passion rejuvenated, pulling him back into the creative world and into the path of Gloria (Greta Lee), a captivating actress who has taken an interest in him. Critics were impressed upon its debut at the Venice International Film Festival, giving it a strong 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, with high marks for Dafoe’s performance in particular.
The Birthday Party, meanwhile, bows on August 14 and sees Dafoe instead playing a gloomy Greek billionaire trying to host the perfect 25th birthday for his daughter on his private island. That is, until unforeseen events occur and the day spirals out of his control, shaking the very foundations of his life and power. Miguel Ángel Jiménez directed the feature, which is based on Panos Karnezis‘ acclaimed 2007 novel and features a starry multinational cast including Vic Carmen Sonne, Joe Cole, Emma Suárez, and Christos Stergioglou. Its release comes a full year after it debuted at the Locarno Film Festival.
Werwulf tears into theaters on Christmas Day. Stay tuned here at Collider for more on Eggers’ latest gothic horror as it nears.
