“I have a distinctive face, but then it’s also a flexible face, a rubber face.” He mentions Vaseline, motor oil, glue, solvents. He adds, a little bemused: “When I was a kid, some guy told me that if I was an actor I had to start moisturizing.” The more dramatic parts he’s played have required half days in the makeup chair.

Almost 30 years of wearing heavy makeup probably lined me pretty well.” I don’t like to think about my face, but the truth is I have to look in my mirror far too much, because I’m involved in the ritual of makeup. “I come from that tradition where sometimes you don’t even see the face. “We have to find a way to believe and pretend. Meyerhold than method acting, which he characterizes thusly: “You are in a scene at a funeral, you say, ‘I want to cry here, so I am going to think about that time that I cried,’ and with that memory, you’re not in the room anymore, you’re back in Wisconsin! He has done yoga daily for 15 years and is more inclined toward the physical disciplines of He was onstage with the Wooster Group before he was in movies, doing extreme physical theater. “He has to play someone out of the ordinary - twisted, off, deviant, mysterious, enigmatic.” “He’s such a sweet guy, but it’s hard for him to play who he is, because his features are so extreme that he eats up the screen,” says the casting director Antonia Dauphin.

But Dafoe is perfectly affable, and seems kind. His looks belong in a spectrum of dangerous men with flared nostrils and prominent cheekbones that ranges from the beauty of Rudolf Nureyev to the crazy rictus of Klaus Kinski. Makeup artists swoon over his features, while blogosphere puppies think he’s ugly. If Milton’s “Paradise Lost” were ever filmed, he’d make a sexy Satan. He also gives off something a little supernatural, a touch post-human he’s never been Romeo and will not be King Lear, but he is, and always has been, Ariel and Caliban at once. His chin takes up a good third of his face. His face is all facets: his cheekbones jut over great suffering hollows, his lips are full, his mouth so wide that his smile creates horizontal lines on his cheeks that could pass for cat’s whiskers. Willem Dafoe looks like a demiurge as rendered by a cubist.

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