Top 80 Willem Dafoe Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I was watching ‘Wild at Heart,’ and I can honestly say I did nothing for that apart from show up!”

— Willem Dafoe

52. “The bad things about theatre get balanced by the good things in film and vice versa. So to tell you the truth, I love it when I can go back and forth – it feeds different parts of you and exercises different muscles.”

— Willem Dafoe

53. “Sometimes you make very interesting movies that aren’t meant for everybody. But this is a capitalist society, so everything conspires to put value on whether it sells or not.”

— Willem Dafoe

54. “Emotionally men and women are different, but only as a result of the physical differences. It all comes back to our bodies.”

— Willem Dafoe

55. “It’s fair to say that if you have a lot of experience, your power is greater. You have more of an opportunity to roll up your sleeves with younger directors.”

— Willem Dafoe

56. “Plenty of bad movies are very successful, and plenty of good movies are not. And distribution is so crazy, some films won’t even get their day in court.”

— Willem Dafoe

57. “If you get stuck and it feels a little stiff, then you do have to mess it up to find it. But other times it’s really written and you just stick to your guns and do it as elegantly and as concentrated and as committed as you can.”

— Willem Dafoe

58. “I was doing community theater, and I was always interested in acting, but I was also interested in sports. I was interested in a lot of things. I was a pretty normal guy. I wasn’t like a guy who grew up in a dark theater watching movies.”

— Willem Dafoe

59. “Trust is always a factor. You’ve just got to look at the big picture, and you’ve got to look at the small picture – the small picture in the sense that you’ve got to make every scene work and you’ve got to deal with what people are presenting you with, too.”

— Willem Dafoe

60. “When I was a kid I was very interested in the idea of the will, finding out what you’re capable of. I liked those kind of challenges.”

— Willem Dafoe

61. “Central to being an actor is pretending, and the adventure of it all. That’s why you become a junkie for different kinds of situations.”

— Willem Dafoe

62. “All the time, as an actor, you want to be asking what’s next and where things are going. If you’re not asking those questions, you’re not growing.”

— Willem Dafoe

63. “It’s too easy to trivialize people. The Internet does it all the time.”

— Willem Dafoe

64. “I don’t worry so much about the audience. I want them very much to be involved and enjoy the movie, but I try to just inhabit the character in a full way, where I can create a personal stake.”

— Willem Dafoe

65. “Usually when you meet with a director, just meeting them after you’ve seen something you’re interested in, they say, “Oh I’d love to work together,” and sometimes you never hear from them again.”

— Willem Dafoe

66. “Truth is, generally I like film festivals; somewhere at some level there’s an exchange of ideas.”

— Willem Dafoe

67. “That’s a frustration sometimes, that certain directors that I’d like to work with, they just aren’t doing stories that I’m sort of castable in. Not always, but sometimes I have that frustration.”

— Willem Dafoe

68. “I try to do as many of my own stunts as possible. If you keep on taking yourself out of the role you play, you lose the thread of the character.”

— Willem Dafoe

69. “Any actor who tells you that he makes choices, absolutely, is wrong. You find work and work finds you.”

— Willem Dafoe

70. “The director’s very important to me, particularly when the director has a recognizable style.”

— Willem Dafoe

71. “When I give over to somebody’s vision rather than have an idea of what I need to do, it takes me to places I wouldn’t have got to by myself. I’m always attracted to a strong director.”

— Willem Dafoe

72. “Film is fragmented and gets into lots of other people’s hands. There are a lot of pleasures that theatre gives me. You get to perform uninterrupted.”

— Willem Dafoe

73. “I do want to be in mainstream movies that are going to be seen. I suppose it satisfies the showbiz side of me.”

— Willem Dafoe

74. “In films you do a scene, you play around with it and unless you’re doing a lot of reshooting, which no one has the luxury to do, you deal with the problem for a day and then you move on. On some level, it never allows you to go very deep into what performing is about.”

— Willem Dafoe

75. “The real difficulty for smaller films, when they’re made independently and it’s time to go for a distributor, sometimes if it’s a tough film and the people who financed it need their money back right away, it’s much easier and lucrative to take a DVD deal.”

— Willem Dafoe

76. “I’ve been in very few flat-out comedies. But I feel like I’ve always made comedies.”

— Willem Dafoe

77. “I want to work with people who are good at what they do, and people who are passionate.”

— Willem Dafoe

78. “Socially, I like the idea of sitting in a theater with a bunch of people.”

— Willem Dafoe

79. “The Midwest isn’t somewhere you mix with those from the performing arts. But my mum and dad would go off to Chicago every so often to see shows. They would bring back the albums and the movies, those little eight metres, and we would all watch. I think that was when I fell in love with acting.”

— Willem Dafoe

80. “You can be intuitive when you’ve got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons.”

— Willem Dafoe

81. “I love doing action and stuff; the problem is usually action movies are not that interesting. Also as I get older I feel like there’s less opportunities for me.”

— Willem Dafoe

82. “I pride myself on being fairly polite on a set so it’s kind of a guilty pleasure to poke others on the set.”

— Willem Dafoe

83. “I aspire to be an instrument of the director. I’m happiest like that. The stronger the director, the more I’m willing to give them.”

— Willem Dafoe