Over four decades of his career, Willem Dafoe He is still so dedicated to his craft that he will appear on a movie set even when he is not required to. In the case of his upcoming film, Yorgos Lanthimos’ andDafoe went a step further by asking the co-star Emma Stone to slap him 20 times for one scene despite not being on camera for the shot.
According to a new profile of The New York Times T Magazine, Stone has a scene in the movie where his character slaps Dafoe. Although Dafoe was not required to attend the shoot, Dafoe “insisted that the action would be more authentic if he was slapped” and took the staged hit “about 20 times.”
“That’s what you want from actors,” Lanthimos said of Dafoe being “self-motivated on set” (jargon for actors who show up when there’s no official reason to be there). “Want to be a part of it in any way.”
Stone added, “There’s an acting instinct that a lot of actors have — the ‘look at me, look at me!’ type of performer. He is the opposite of that. Maybe it has changed over the years. A lot of actors I’ve bonded with have been doing this for a long time, and you know they go from ‘I’ to ‘We.’”
The scheme details for and is kept under wraps, but we know it will also feature Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau.
Dafoe is set to appear next in the psychological thriller withinwhich hits theaters on March 17. He is also part of the stacked cast for Wes Anderson’s next film, Asteroid Citywith Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson, and many more.