More than four decades into his career, Willem Dafoe is still so dedicated to his craft that he’ll show up to a movie set even when he’s not required to be there. In the case of his upcoming film, Yorgos Lanthimos’ And, Dafoe went one step further by asking co-star Emma Stone to slap him 20 times for a scene despite being off camera for the shot.
According to a new profile in The New York Times T Magazine, Stone has a scene in the movie in which her character slaps Dafoe’s. Though Dafoe wasn’t even required to be present for the shoot, Dafoe “insisted that the move would look more genuine if he were actually being slapped” and took the staged hit “some 20 times.”
“That’s what you want from actors,” Lanthimos said about Dafoe being “self-motivating to set” (jargon for actors showing up when there’s no official reason to be there). “To want to be part of it in any way.”
Stone added, “There’s this instinct to perform that many actors have — the ‘look at me, look at me!’ kind of performer. He’s the opposite of that. Maybe it’s changed through the years. A lot of actors I bond with have been doing this for a long time, and you know they’ve gone from ‘I’ to ‘We.’”
The plot details for And are being kept under wraps, but we do know it will also feature Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau.
Dafoe is slated to next appear in the psychological thriller Inside, which is out in theaters on March 17th. He is also part of the stacked cast for Wes Anderson’s next film, Asteroid City, alongside Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Tom Hanks, Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson, and many more.