It’s Willem Dafoe’s birthday today. I love Willem Dafoe. To be fair, I have an abiding affection for nearly all peculiar character actors, but Willem’s firmly on a special level, reserved for people whose first appearance on-screen in any movie makes me point happily at the screen like an idiot and yell, “Hey! Hey…..you!”
You can put Buscemi in this club, too – you can tell I love him and consider him to be almost family by the fact that I refer to him affectionately by his last name, like we were buddies in high school or we worked together on a construction crew and bonded. “Hey, Buscemi!” I’d shout good-naturedly, cupping my hands around my mouth. “Get me a fucking stack of two-by-fours and a sledgehammer, you son of a bitch! We gotta finish this house!” And then he’d give me the finger and that weird, sneering smile of his.
They’re both weird looking guys, who, as a weird-looking guy, I feel a bit of a kinship with. They’re not movie stars, in the glitzy, pejorative sense of the term, who automatically seem distant and thus also a little bit like assholes – they’re just dudes, who as far as I know might have just taken a wrong turn on their way to the heroin dealer and ended up on a movie set. Regular people. I like that. I am giddy when they’ve got a role.
The funny thing about Dafoe is that, although you’d put character actors as a group obviously lower than the proverbial megastars in the Hollywood hierarchy, I feel like his career is responsible for just as many, if not more, iconic, memorable moments as those of your Will Smiths or your Tom Cruises or whichever film hero you’d like to line up. For every Risky Business Underwear Slide or “I HAVE GOT TO GET ME ONE OF THESE,” I see your bet and raise you things like:
THERE WAS A FIREFIIIIIIIIIIIGHT
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