Willem Dafoe laughs easily, which feels almost suspicious for a man whose face has launched a thousand nightmares. He’s spent a career walking the line between madness and grace — Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, a goblin in Spider-Man, a lonely sailor in The Lighthouse, and now, a mysterious tenant with a moral proposition in The Man in My Basement. “You always start from a place of insecurity,” he tells me. “First days on a set are miserable for me. I’m nervous. You’d think that after doing this many times, you’d be like, ‘I got this.’ But it’s never like that.”
The new film, adapted from Walter Mosley’s novel, drops Dafoe into the humid unease of Sag Harbor, New York. Corey Hawkins plays Charles Blakey, a man about to lose his ancestral home when a stranger named Aniston Bennett (Dafoe) offers an indecent proposal: rent him the basement for the summer in exchange for enough money to erase his debts. It’s a setup that smells faintly of Get Out and The Shining, but the horror here is quieter — moral rot disguised as opportunity.
Dafoe, who’s made a career out of inhabiting strange men in stranger rooms, doesn’t approach it like a philosopher dissecting evil. “I pretend,” he says simply. “That’s what I do. I pretend I’m the guy. That’s all.”
When he says it, it doesn’t sound dismissive. It sounds freeing. “Little kids, they’re deep in it sometimes. You know — I play the cop, you play the robber. Let’s go. They’re in it. That’s acting,” he shrugs. “Performing is about doing things. I don’t think about interpreting or what I have to say. I’m much more concentrated on the experience of the doing.”
That mindset might explain why he’s in more movies than most actors watch. Five in 2024, seven the year before, and a half-dozen more coming this year. “You’re activated by the camera,” he says. “The situation makes the character. When those situations and environments that make that character are gone, the character goes away too.” He pauses, then smiles. “Anyone’s capable of any kind of behavior. You just willfully tap into those things and try to let them emerge.”
That philosophy — act, don’t analyze — also protects him from the emotional hangovers that come with roles this dark. The Man in My Basement is thick with moral ambiguity, trauma, and confinement. “If you can survive this stuff in pretend, you start to get the illusion that you can survive it in life,” he says. “So, it becomes a little bit of a vehicle for courage.”
He doesn’t call it therapy. He doesn’t call it art. He just calls it doing the work. “You always at the beginning say, ‘Hm, how does this go?’ And I’m grateful for that,” he admits. “That’s what keeps you alive and not just sleepwalking through stuff you already know.”
The film itself defies easy genre labels, though Dafoe doesn’t mind when people try. “I guess you’d say psychological thriller with a little horror spice in there,” he muses. “There are certain conventions that can propel things — they let people relax because there’s a familiarity. But if you let them stay too comfortable, it just becomes a diversion. I think genre invites people in, and then the other stuff — the uncomfortable stuff — creeps up on them.”
He’s not wrong. Director Nadia Latif uses the familiar grammar of suspense — shadows, whispered dialogue, a locked door — to lure the audience into something closer to an exorcism of American guilt. Dafoe’s character, with his impeccable diction and unfathomable motives, becomes a mirror for what Hawkins’s character refuses to see in himself. “Much of it is hung on the text,” Dafoe says. “It’s quite direct for the most part because the emphasis is on that. The text is very strong.”
He grins when I bring up one of his lines — “People die every day” — the kind of cold wisdom that only sounds profound coming from a man in a basement. “It’s all the context,” he says. “Sometimes the things that are expressed are a little prosaic, but given where they sit in the speech, they kind of sing.”
There’s something unteachable about the way Dafoe approaches this stuff — a balance of rigor and chaos, craft and surrender. I tell him it reminds me of the way Keith Richards or Mike Campbell talk about guitar playing. They’re not theorizing about it; they’re just plugged in. He grins. “You can play a song a million times, but if you know how to enter it every millionth time, then you’re a musician.”
It’s a perfect Dafoe-ism — that unguarded mix of discipline and madness. Acting, like rock and roll, isn’t about control; it’s about trust. “You direct the ship,” he says, “and then the ship will go in the right direction.”
Watch the full interview above and then check out the trailer below.
