This article first appeared in TheWrap’s Actors/Directors/Screenwriters Oscar magazine.
Award-winning actor Willem Dafoe has played real-life characters T.S. Eliot, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Max Schreck and even Jesus Christ in the past. And now, with “At Eternity’s Gate”, he can throw troubled artist Vincent van Gogh into the mix. In the film, a meditative and often abstract portrait of the painter by artist and director Julian Schnabel, Dafoe had to channel Van Gogh’s mental anguish — but more important than that, he had to learn to paint.
In fact, that’s what originally drew Dafoe to the film — that it had an “accent on painting” and wasn’t focusing too much on Van Gogh’s mental illness.