Kinds Of Kindness: Willem Dafoe is weird and wonderful in the unfathomable world of Yorgos Lanthimos

Willem Dafoe is not afraid of weird. Anyone who has seen his performance in The Lighthouse, the 2019 psychological horror from Robert Eggers, will attest to that. But, the prolific actor, who, in his 60s, has averaged five movies a year over the past five years, seems to have found the perfect collaborator in cinema’s pre-eminent weirdo, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. After toiling away in his own relatively obscure corner of Greek indie filmmaking oddness, Lanthimos made a successful jump into English-language absurdity in 2015 with The Lobster. Starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, this black comedy earned Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay, with the emphasis on “original”. The director built on that success, first with The Killing Of A Sacred Deer and, then, most notably with The Favourite, a dark historical comedy about the life and loves of Queen Anne, penned by award-winning Aussie screenwriter Tony McNamara. With the great Olivia Colman in the role of Queen Anne, and Emma Stone and Weisz cast as her competing love interests, The Favourite received 10 Academy Award nominations, winning best actress for Colman. Having successfully secured Hollywood’s attention (The Favourite’s global box office return in excess of $100 million didn’t hurt), Lanthimos convinced studio bosses to give him more money than he’d ever had before. The result was Poor Things. This exercise in steampunk science fiction, with an Oscar-winning performance by Stone at its core, might just be the strangest movie to ever make it to a mainstream audience, again topping the $100 million mark at the box office. Among the many incredible performances was one from the man tasked with playing the weirdest role of all, that of eccentric surgeon Dr Godwin Baxter. A Pygmalion meets Dr Frankenstein type, who burps bubbles and is riddled with deformities from a childhood in which his father performed grotesque experiments on him. Who would you cast in such a role? Dafoe, of course. He was the perfect choice to play a father and god-like figure to Stone’s ingenue, Bella. “Emma just makes me behave a certain way,” Dafoe laughs on a Zoom call with STM. “I get around her and I get into prankster mode.” So, it wasn’t a hard decision to reunite with Stone and Lanthimos on the director’s new film, Kinds Of Kindness. “Emma’s very game to do whatever is required, and she also has terrific craft as an actress,” Dafoe says. “So she has those two poles of performing — she has terrific control, but she also really has terrific abandon. “When you’re around that, when you have partners that have that … it lets things flow better, so they give you energy, and hopefully you give them energy.” If it seems as though Kinds Of Kindness is arriving on the heels of Poor Things, the truth is even more incredible — Lanthimos made these two very different films concurrently. The wildly imaginative Victorian world of Poor Things required considerable post-production to bring to life, and the director found himself with time on his hands. So, why not keep a few of his cast members around (Stone, Dafoe and Margaret Qualley), bring in some addition talent (Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn and Mamoudou Athie), and make another movie? The director had some ideas kicking around from his writing sessions with Filippou over the years, and he figured turning those ideas into a triptych structure, set in the real world (Lanthimos’ surreal version of it, anyway) would allow them to make something interesting on a tight production schedule. Three short films, stitched together loosely by the appearance of a single mysterious, non-verbal character, RMF, with the same small cast playing different characters in each story. The first story is about a man (Plemons) trying to wrest control of his life from an overbearing boss (Dafoe), who previously governed all decisions, from diet to dating, and even orchestrated car accidents. In the second story, Plemons plays a policeman who becomes convinced his wife (Stone) is a different person after being lost at sea. The final tale sees Plemons and Stone on a mission to find a messiah with special abilities, in order to serve the interests of the leader of their sex cult (played by who else but Dafoe). Individually, the films explore the delusion of free will, control and belief, with a side order of cannibalism, sexual gratification and the brutality of interpersonal relationships. The meaning when taken together? Well, your guess is as good as anyone’s. When asked if Lanthimos shed any light on the intentions behind Kinds Of Kindness, Dafoe doesn’t hesitate. “His way of working is we don’t discuss a lot, we really concentrate on just working with the text and realising the actions and what is happening in that world that we’re in,” the actor says. “And, I think on some level, he doesn’t know exactly what it is. I think the beautiful thing about working that way is there’s enough evocative stuff that people are going to have their own interpretations. “People, I think, sometimes get a little crazy about what stuff means. It’s going to mean different things for different people … and I think that’s the strength of it. “It’s not like a typical, escapist popcorn movie, I wouldn’t say, but it’s got a sense of humour, and if you go with it, I think it can be a really enjoyable experience and stimulating.” Kinds Of Kindness was Chau’s first experience working with Lanthimos, but his reputation preceded him. Having recently earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance alongside Brendan Fraser in the 2022 drama The Whale, working with the Greek director was an opportunity too good for Chau to pass up. “It’s really easy when you’re working with somebody who has such a compelling body of work,” Chau tells STM. “I’ve seen all of his movies prior to working with him, and it was just easy to go in and to surrender to the experience.” For Dafoe, it was another chance to work with a director he felt creatively inspired by. Over the years, the actor has returned to filmmakers with a singular aesthetic, from Eggers (who cast Dafoe in his anticipated upcoming version of vampire classic Nosferatu) to Wes Anderson and Lars von Trier. So, how does Lanthimos compare? “Well, they’re all auteurs, they all have a special language, so to talk about the differences is really to talk about the difference of their personalities, and that gets intimate in a funny way,” Dafoe explains. “So, they are all people that have a very specific take on the world … and it gets expressed not only in the shooting, but the editing, the choice of the music, the choice of the actors, choice in the costumes, all that becomes cumulative, and it starts to articulate.” What exactly Lanthimos is trying to articulate in Kinds Of Kindness will be debated in film schools for years to come, and will be the subject of discussions by people who decide on major awards. What is not up for debate, however, is the continued excellence of Dafoe, in all his weird and wonderful glory. Kinds Of Kindness is in theatres July 11.