Willem Dafoe enjoys being your fashion icon

Willem Dafoe just received his fourth Golden Globe nomination for his role in Poor Things, but that’s not the only distinction the acclaimed actor has received in his storied career. He’s also recently been embraced as a style icon—a “Drip King,” in the parlance of Gen Z. His sartorial sense has been celebrated online, his photoshoots pored over and widely shared. If you’re wondering how Dafoe feels about this particular honor, well, he’s delighted by it, as he told The A.V. Club on the red carpet for Poor Things.

“Okay good,” Dafoe responded when told that he’s a style icon on Twitter. “You know, I like doing photo shoots… with a good photographer and a good stylist. You play around, you know, you take clothes sometimes that you wouldn’t normally wear in your life, and you put them on and you try to make them live.”

Dafoe opined that clothes for photoshoots are “just like a costume in a funny way.” He went on, “[Then] to work with a photographer, there’s usually some sort of intention or rules, and… you play around, you know, you try to fill it, you try to find shapes, you try to find the possibilities. It’s like a quick version of the kind of collaboration you do when you’re doing a movie. … So I enjoy it.”

Dafoe previously spoke with GQ in 2022 on the subject, admitting that he’s not necessarily “into” fashion, but “My go-to people have always been Prada, because there’s something classic [about the clothes] and I just like how I feel in them and they’re beautifully made.” His sense of style is so strong that once he refused to wear the clothes at a shoot because they were “terrible,” and sourced outfits right off the backs of some crew members instead. Speaking at the time about participating in photoshoots, he said, “It’s kind of what happens in approaching a character except it’s condensed, it’s very immediate.”

It follows that in much the same way Dafoe is particular about clothes, he’s particular about his characters. “It makes me crazy when people call him, like, a mad scientist. Because he’s not, he’s got a lot going on and that kind of gives the wrong impression of who he is,” the actor told The A.V. Club about his Poor Things character Dr. Godwin Baxter. He’d rather “take the high road” describing Baxter: “You know, he’s a guy that has had a tough life, he’s scarred, and he tries to—[he] dedicates himself to science. And he does this unorthodox experiment.”

That experiment, if a tad unethical, “really represented giving hope to himself” and to Bella (Emma Stone), because he gives her “a second life.” Dr. Baxter “takes care, he teaches her, he holds on to it too tight but then lets her go. And in the end, you know, the arc of the character and the relationship is, I think, quite beautiful.”