By Sandy Cohen, Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --Willem Dafoe came into "The Florida Project" ready to be transformed, and working in a cheap motel helped him get there.
The 62-year-old actor has been collecting accolades — including a Golden Globe Award nod and Screen Actors Guild Award nomination — for his performance in the Sean Baker film, which was set and shot at the Magic Castle hotel in the shadows of Orlando's Disney World.
Dafoe said filming at a real hotel that houses homeless families like the one at the heart of the film changed his perspective as a performer.
"The beautiful thing is you learn things and then you can apply it to the pretending. And I love that situation, where you're not really just drawing from your impressions and your thoughts, but you're really getting outside of yourself," he said in a recent interview. "That's always when the best things happen, when you're a little — you're new, you know? You have a better chance to enter into a kind of new way of thinking. And being around the people of our story and being in the actual place, it guides you. It just tells you what you need to do, and that's always thrilling because you feel like it opens your mind and your heart and broadens the possibility of how you are."
Immersive settings, and real settings, allow him to connect more deeply with his characters, he said. He just finished playing Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel's "At Eternity's Gate," which shot in various European locations where the artist spent time.
"When you do that, you can't help but, with a little imagination, feel his presence there; or imagine that that a tree, that old big tree that is 200 years old, was in his presence and now you're in its presence and there's some sort of connection," Dafoe said. "So you're aware of those things and you do kind of connect the dots and make a connectivity that you wouldn't normally have."
He said that while all his past characters stay with him, some make more of an impression than others — Van Gogh among them.
"Great experience, really beautiful, really challenging, but the first thing I want to do is shave off my beard to try to get back to a neutral place," Dafoe said.
He returned from Europe the morning of the Golden Globe nominations and was awoken after little sleep with news of his supporting actor nod. The veteran actor is deeply appreciative of the recognition.
"The nature of performing, the nature of making things, the nature of making movies, it isn't a science. It's not precise. It's full of all kinds of variables. So, no matter how long you do it, it's an uncertain life, so you're always happy for encouragement. You're always happy for someone to say, 'Keep going, keep going. We like what you're doing,'" he said. "From day to day, the whole the whole prospect of performing is you're kind of wiping the slate clean every time, so you're starting from zero. And that zero is not that different from the zero that you were at when you had never made a film before. So it helps to be encouraged."
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More