Willem Dafoe on Robert Eggers, Yorgos Lanthimos, and ‘Late Fame’

Willem Dafoe is in the midst of a massive year — and he’s playing a character whose life is small by design.

In director Kent Jones’ “Late Fame” (out Aug. 7 in New York and Aug. 19 in Los Angeles and other cities), Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, a postal employee who, in his youth, had been a published poet and edged up to real success. Whether by choice or circumstance, Ed has faded into utter obscurity, and seems to like it that way — until Meyers (Edmund Donovan), the leader of a group of self-styled intellectuals that also includes a glamorous but fading actress (Greta Lee), introduces himself to the man he calls an artistic forebear. Suddenly, Ed is at the center of a social whirl that destabilizes him, and makes him wonder if fame isn’t actually so bad.

Dafoe is hardly chasing notoriety, but Saxberger’s impulse to put down his pen and walk away from work is very unlike him. His five other 2026 projects include “Tenzing,” in which Dafoe plays the commander who led the first successful attempt to surmount Everest, and “Werwulf,” the latest Robert Eggers gothic-horror freakout, this time set in the 13th century.

Since beginning his career in New York’s experimental theater scene in the 1970s, Dafoe has ranged from indie cinema — with his two most recent Oscar nominations coming from Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project” and Julian Schnabel’s “At Eternity’s Gate” — to major productions. Of late, his collaborations with Eggers (“Nosferatu,” “The Lighthouse,” “The Northman”) and with Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things,” “Kinds of Kindness”) have been particularly fruitful. But those performances tend toward the grander-scale; in “Late Fame,” Dafoe is muted and interior, conjuring both the cerebral quality of a poet and the stoicism of someone who had believed he had made the choice to live a quiet life.

Variety spoke with Dafoe about the film, and about lessons he’s…