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" It makes me laugh when I hear a guy talking about being in touch with his feminine side. But I gravitate towards women; I identify with them. And I do cry very easily, more and more as I get older. "

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" One of the pleasures of being an actor is quite simply taking a walk in someone else's shoes. And when I look at the roles I've played, I'm kind of amazed at all the wonderful adventures I've had and the different things I've learned. "

Willem Dafoe

Walk

Someone

Shoes

" I guess they often cast me as the bad guy, because I'm not, er, conventional looking. I look sort of violent. I'm the odd one out, the outsider. "

Willem Dafoe

Bad

Bad Guy

" Celebrity is okay as long as you know it's not about you. "

" I think, as I've gotten older, I've been able to be more reckless with my choices, because practically speaking, you get less careful. Your choices become more instinctive, and you feel like if you make a mistake, it won't destroy you. "

" You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons. "

Willem Dafoe

Got

Role

" When you work on anything, you want to find the range of impulses - which ones get portrayed is another question, but you want to have that complexity and that fullness, even if you're playing a cartoon character. "

" It's no fun for an actor to keep repeating what you did before. It's always changing. I'm changing. The target keeps moving. That's the beauty of it. "

" When I was a kid I was very interested in the idea of the will, finding out what you're capable of. I liked those kind of challenges. "

" I'm not attracted to naturalism, I'm not attracted to behavior, I'm attracted to dance. I'm attracted to gesture, I'm attracted to singing with your voice, as opposed to having a natural manner. I'm a theater actor first, so that probably influences a lot of my approach. And I think in many ways, naturalism has ruined movies. "

" In order to inhabit a character, you've got to embrace and empathise with them. "

" There's a real wisdom to not saying a thing. "

" That's a frustration sometimes, that certain directors that I'd like to work with, they just aren't doing stories that I'm sort of castable in. Not always, but sometimes I have that frustration. "

" I was watching 'Wild at Heart,' and I can honestly say I did nothing for that apart from show up! "

" The Midwest isn't somewhere you mix with those from the performing arts. But my mum and dad would go off to Chicago every so often to see shows. They would bring back the albums and the movies, those little eight metres, and we would all watch. I think that was when I fell in love with acting. "

" I don't have a preference between theatre and film; I like to do both. But I will say that there's something about theatre that is more nourishing and sustaining than film ever can be. "

" Weirdness is not my game. I'm just a square boy from Wisconsin. "

" Film is an editor's medium. You can create very good raw material and they can make it horrible, or you can do not so well and they can make it beautiful. You don't really know. "

" A lot of critics are lazy. They don't want to look closely and analyze something for what it is. They take a quick first impression and then rush to compare it to something they've seen before. "

" The director's very important to me, particularly when the director has a recognizable style. "

Willem Dafoe

Very

Style

" Action breeds inspiration more than inspiration breeds action. "

Willem Dafoe

Inspiration

Breeds

" All the time, as an actor, you want to be asking what's next and where things are going. If you're not asking those questions, you're not growing. "

" Great theatre is about challenging how we think and encouraging us to fantasize about a world we aspire to. "

Willem Dafoe

Theatre

World

" I set myself challenges every time I work. Ideally, I approach everything as though it's the first time - with a beginner's mind and an amateur's love. "

" I have no doubt that if I met Bob Dylan, it would be disappointing - and annoying to him. But that's why I like Bob Dylan. "

" Sometimes I say I feel more like a dancer than an actor, because there are things implied about being an actor that I don't really like. I feel more comfortable with the word 'performer'. I like being the thing. I like being the doer. There's a factualness to it. And then certain resonances happen out of how you apply yourself physically. "

" The bad things about theatre get balanced by the good things in film and vice versa. So to tell you the truth, I love it when I can go back and forth - it feeds different parts of you and exercises different muscles. "

" In films you do a scene, you play around with it and unless you're doing a lot of reshooting, which no one has the luxury to do, you deal with the problem for a day and then you move on. On some level, it never allows you to go very deep into what performing is about. "

" Turn off the sound in a movie, and if you can tell what's going on, the movie should work. "

" Any actor who tells you that he makes choices, absolutely, is wrong. You find work and work finds you. "

" I'm one of those people who when I go over a bridge, I want to jump. It's just this intense tickle in the back of my throat. It's like I'm on the verge the whole time I'm walking over that bridge, and I'm not going to get a release until I jump. "