Willem Dafoe is back to work after the end of the actor’s strike. Dafoe was in attendance with his wife, filmmaker and actress, Giada Colagrande at the 20th Marrakech Film Festival.
In an interview with Variety, Dafoe spoke about everything from being back in Morocco, Poor Things, speaking Italian, and Beetlejuice 2. Dafoe expressed his excitement about being back in Morocco for the film festival.
“I’m happy to be back. Morocco for me is The Last Temptation of Christ, a film that was a beautiful experience. And I loved shooting it because it demanded a lot of me and it was really full on. And it was very in the nature of Morocco.”
Variety also spoke with Dafoe about his recent role in Poor Things. Dafoe played an unorthodox surgeon, Godwin Baxter in the film alongside Emma Stone. While he was not in attendance for the film festival circuit for the movie in solidarity with the actor’s strike, he spoke about being in the movie at the Marrakech festival: “I was surrounded by all this beautiful [Victorian] detail in this complete world; and also great cast, great script.”
Poor Things is a black comedy directed by Yorgos Lanthumos. The movie is based on the Alasdair Gray novel of the same name from 1992. Dafoe said of the film, “I don’t know this for a fact, but I think there’s a lot of Alasdair Gray in that character [Dr. Godwin Baxter]. And he’s quite an amusing guy. He’s eccentric, he’s intellectual, he’s playful. He’s a thinker; a free thinker.”
Dafoe starred in another film that screened in Venice alongside Poor Things. The film was Saverio Costanzo’s Finally Dawn. In the film, which is set in the 1950s, he plays an American art dealer. The role called for Dafoe to speak Italian, which the actor is no stranger to, however, Dafoe said there were challenges in speaking for everyday life and speaking Italian to perform.
Dafoe has been hard at work since the end of the strike with several movies coming out in the next year. One of them being Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice 2, where he will be playing a police officer in the afterlife. He states, “I’m a dead person. And in life I was a B-movie action star, but I had an accident and that’s what sent me to the other side.”
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