Does it take extraordinary ordinariness to play extreme madness and badness? That's the question that comes to mind as I listen to Willem Dafoe speak. Dressed in beige and grey, he sits on a sofa in a dimly lit Manhattan club and delivers quiet, circumspect answers to my questions. If this is a little surprising, it's only because the 59-year-old is one of the most captivating actors of his generation. He electrifies everything he's in, tempering wildness with the physical control of an actor meticulously trained in stage before screen.
It does his talents a disservice to speak only of his face, but it also happens to be one of the most remarkable in Hollywood, diabolic in one light, divine in another; he seems to have an almost supernatural ability for willing that cragginess into handsome or horrible, as the role demands.
In his latest movie, Anton Corbijn's subdued and subtle adaptation of the John le Carre thriller A Most Wanted Man, he's somewhere in between those two. He plays Tommy Brue, the head of a private bank, into which his late father has laundered an enormous sum of money for the most wanted man of the title, a mysterious half-Chechen, half-Russian illegal immigrant called Issa. That ill-gotten fortune moulders in the vaults while the question of Issa's identity - deadly terrorist seeking to fund attacks or torture-victim refugee wishing only to wash his hands of his father's dirty money? - steadily propels the film.
The movie has also granted Dafoe the strange, tragic privilege of sharing Philip Seymour Hoffman's last film. Hoffman plays Gunther Bachmann, a renegade counter-intelligence agent sinking ever further into professional - and personal - desperation. The actor died in February at the age of 46, a fact that makes his already devastating performance even more painful to watch.
