Untitled, or, The Spark of Willem Dafoe

Willem Dafoe is happy to be here. 

That's the impression I get as I'm sitting in the bucket seats of BU's Tsai Performance Center on Comm Ave. Dafoe has come clomping out from backstage with Dean Harvey Young, the College of Fine Arts' newest dean, and he's smiling.

The whole auditorium is abuzz to see and hear the actor who donated his archives to BU's Howard Gotlieb Archival Center. Dafoe is here tonight to be in conversation with Dean Harvey as part of the Friends Speaker Series.

I'm abuzz too. I'm here to listen to, and be in the same room as, the man who has startled and delighted me throughout the years with not only the work choices he's made, but the way he has brought the roles to life.

“When you’re hanging on to who you think you are, it can block you, and prevent you from living life.”

I first saw Dafoe when he played Paul Smecker, an eloquent, outside-the-box FBI agent-turned-vigilante in one of my top five movies of all time, The Boondock Saints. Dafoe knocked me flat with his strange inhabitation of Agent Smecker. He was strange, he was unpredictable, he was real. It was unlike anything I'd seen before from an actor. Throughout the years, he's popped up in other movies, and always arrested and surprised me with his spark--The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Spider-Man and others.

Tonight, Dafoe looks like Wolverine with his wild hair and cut cheekbones and jawline.

The talk begins.

Dean Harvey peppers Dafoe with questions about where he's come from--Wisconsin (though Dafoe is quick to point out his mother's from Dorchester and his father attended Harvard Med School)--and how he got his start in acting (highlighting his involvement in community theatre and the Wooster Group in New York). The conversation is light and easy, and they invite questions from the crowd. On life and his craft, Dafoe offers wisdom like drops of rain: 

• [On the process of acting] Invest in the finding out. Cleanse yourself of expectations.
• [When acting] My ambition is to be like an animal--natural, graceful.
• [On working with first-time actors in the Florida Project:] It was fun to be around people who didn't have a shtick.
• [On how he finds happiness:] I find happiness disappearing into a certain role. [I find happiness] when I'm not there anymore and I lose myself.
• When you're hanging on to who you think you are, it can block you, and prevent you from living life.

Dafoe's desire to explore human fallibility, our human-ness, what we're made of--this vibrates. He puts it that he wants to "shine the light on what the truth is". His energy, his humility, his presence, his way--I find myself thinking of it all days later, and nodding as I wait for the green line train.