"I've knifed them, I've blown them up, I've shot them, I've cut off their heads, I've done all kinds of things."ĭafoe is selling himself short.
"In my life outside of movies I have never shot a gun, but I've killed hundreds of people in films," he says. In William Friedkin's superior low-budget action movie To Live and Die In L.A., Dafoe played counterfeiter Rick Masters, a part that required him to blow open a Secret Service agent's head with a shotgun and execute a client who had betrayed him. "If you don't conventionally look a certain way and you've got a certain kind of presence when you're young, then what's available to you is character roles, and the best character roles when you're young tend to be villains." "It's true in the beginning I started playing villains," he told a crowd at Britain's National Film Theatre in 1998. Incarnations of evil: Willem Dafoe in John Wick. There's usually some sort of moral dilemma in there." I'm attracted to them because they're strong roles. "Whether I participate in that, whether that's who I am, I'm not sure. "It's not a new idea to me that people want me to play dark characters," Dafoe says – to his credit without a hint of weariness in his voice. Although he doesn't do all that much killing, at least not compared with the title character played by Keanu Reeves – who guns down Russian gangsters like a politician shakes hands – he is nonetheless a murderer for hire: another assassin to add to Dafoe's collection of maniacs, vampires, super-villains and creeps. The thing is, in his latest movie, John Wick, Dafoe does play a contract killer. Tell it to Clarence, the talking polar bear. Tell it to Nemo's friend Gill, the Moorish idol with the broken fin. Tell it to Pier Paolo Pasolini, or Special Agent Alan Ward from Mississippi Burning. Tell it to Jesus, or Sergeant Elias, the conscience of Bravo Company in Platoon. To observe that Willem Dafoe plays a lot of bad guys is the most overused conceit a writer who meets him can opt for.
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