Willem Dafoe

He left the University of Wisconsin to do experimental theater, wound up in New York as a founding member of the Wooster Group, and spent years doing avant-garde work that almost nobody outside the downtown scene paid attention to. The film career started small - uncredited in Heaven's Gate, before he played the villain in Streets of Fire. Oliver Stone cast him as Sergeant Elias in Platoon in 1986, and the avant-garde theater guy had an Oscar nomination before he'd done anything resembling a conventional career.

He was Letterboxd's most-watched actor of 2024, appearing in four films that year (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Nosferatu, Kinds of Kindness, Saturday Night) - which is not what a career-twilight looks like. Four Oscar nominations, none of them wins, which somehow fits: the industry keeps acknowledging him without fully knowing what to do with him. He got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January 2024 and was named Artistic Director of Venice Biennale's theater department for 2025-2026, the kind of dual recognition that only makes sense for someone who's always operated between worlds.

He changed his name to 'Willem' in high school, which is one of those details that makes more sense the more you know about him. Born William Dafoe in Appleton, Wisconsin, he spent years doing genuinely uncommercial experimental theater with the Wooster Group before film caught up to him. He has a son, Jack, with director Elizabeth LeCompte, his longtime partner. He married Italian filmmaker Giada Colagrande in 2005 and acquired Italian citizenship, which is how he ended up splitting his time between Rome and New York. Lars von Trier reportedly used a body double for the full-frontal scenes in Antichrist because Dafoe's own was considered too large to film.