Willem Dafoe
William James “Willem” Dafoe (born July 22, 1955) is an American actor. Known for his prolific career portraying diverse roles in both mainstream and arthouse films, he is the recipient of various accolades, including the Volpi Cup for Best Actor as well as nominations for four Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, four Golden Globe Awards, four Critics’ Choice Movie Awards, and five Screen Actors Guild Awards. He has frequently collaborated with filmmakers Paul Schrader, Abel Ferrara, Lars von Trier, Julian Schnabel, Wes Anderson, and Robert Eggers. Dafoe was a founding member of experimental theatre company The Wooster Group.
He made his film debut with an uncredited role in Heaven’s Gate (1980). Dafoe’s early career includes credits for The Loveless (1982), Streets of Fire (1984), and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). He earned his first Academy Award nomination for the war drama Platoon (1986), followed by nominations for his roles in Shadow of the Vampire (2000), The Florida Project (2017), and the Vincent van Gogh biopic At Eternity’s Gate (2018). He also gained acclaim and wide recognition for his roles as Jesus Christ in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and as the supervillain Norman Osborn in the superhero film Spider-Man (2002), a role he reprised in its sequels Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), and the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021).
His other film appearance include roles in Mississippi Burning (1988), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Wild at Heart (1990), Light Sleeper (1992), Body of Evidence (1993), Clear and Present Danger (1994), The English Patient (1996), Affliction (1997), New Rose Hotel(1998), Existenz (1999), The Boondock Saints (1999), American Psycho (2000), Auto Focus (2002), Finding Nemo (2003), The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), Inside Man (2006), Mr. Bean’s Holiday (2007), Antichrist (2009), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Nymphomaniac (2013), The Fault in Our Stars (2014), John Wick (2014), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Aquaman (2018), The Lighthouse (2019), Nightmare Alley (2021), Poor Things (2023), and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024).
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Willem Dafoe Movies
Discover the best Willem Dafoe movies. Explore the complete filmography, including top-rated classics, newest releases, and highest-grossing films starring Willem Dafoe ranked by year and score.
1
Werwulf (2026)
Horror
Medieval England, 1305. A voiceless farmhand carries a curse that transforms him into a beast beneath the full moon. When the crown conscripts him into a wolf-hunting expedition, he must...
Score
-.-
2
Late Fame (2026)
Drama
When a circle of ambitious young artists discovers the unpublished poetry of Ed Saxberger, a once-celebrated New York voice consigned to obscurity, they see something the world forgot. Their enthusiasm...
Score
-.-
3
The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
Adventure
Comedy
Crime
Zsa-zsa Korda has survived ruthless competitors and worse, but his boldest move yet is naming his nun daughter as the sole heir to his vast fortune. When a new business...
Score
6.5
4
The Legend of Ochi (2025)
Adventure
Family
Fantasy
Yuri grows up in an isolated Carpathian village where fear of the ochi, a mysterious creature species, shapes every waking moment. When she stumbles upon an abandoned baby ochi, wounded...
Score
6.2
5
Nosferatu: An Inside Look (2024)
Documentary
Robert Eggers invites viewers into the shadowy production of his vampire epic, revealing how meticulous craft and artistic obsession shaped every frame. From set design to performance, this documentary peels...
Score
5.5
6
Nosferatu (2024)
Fantasy
Horror
Before a young woman can build a life with the man she loves, something ancient and ravenous reaches across the darkness to claim her. Robert Eggers reimagines the foundational vampire...
Score
6.7
7
Saturday Night (2024)
Comedy
Drama
October 11, 1975. In the cramped hallways of NBC's Studio 8H, a collection of ambitious sketch writers and performers scramble through their final ninety minutes before live broadcast. Director Jason...
Score
6.7
8
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
Comedy
Fantasy
Horror
Grief pulls the Deetz family back to Winter River, three generations under one roof and none of them entirely at peace with the past. Lydia has spent years trying to...
Score
6.9
9
Kinds of Kindness (2024)
Comedy
Drama
Yorgos Lanthimos returns with three interlocking fables, each one stranger and more unsettling than the last. The first follows a man desperate to escape the grip of someone who controls...
Score
6.5
10
Poor Things (2023)
Comedy
Romance
Science Fiction
Bella Baxter should not exist. Resurrected by an eccentric surgeon who replaced her brain with that of her unborn child, she enters the world as a woman in body but...
Score
7.6
11
Inside (2023)
Drama
Thriller
When a carefully orchestrated art heist goes sideways, a master thief finds himself sealed inside a Manhattan penthouse surrounded by stolen masterpieces and dwindling supplies. As the hours stretch into...
Score
5.7
12
The Northman (2022)
Action
Adventure
Fantasy
A boy watches his father die at the hands of a treacherous uncle, and the wound never heals. Twenty years later, that boy has become something formidable, a Viking warrior...
Score
7.0
13
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
Action
Adventure
Science Fiction
When Peter Parker's secret identity goes public, his entire world collapses overnight. College plans, friendships, and any hope of a normal life evaporate under the glare of a hostile city....
Score
7.9
14
Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)
Action
Adventure
Fantasy
Superman is gone, and the void he left behind is enormous. Bruce Wayne knows it, and so does the enemy already moving toward Earth. Partnering with Diana Prince, Wayne goes...
Score
8.1
15
The Lighthouse (2019)
Drama
Fantasy
Thriller
Stranded on a fog-choked rock off the New England coast, two men share a lighthouse and almost nothing else. The senior keeper guards the lamp with obsessive jealousy while the...
Score
7.5
16
Aquaman (2018)
Action
Adventure
Fantasy
Arthur Curry has spent his life caught between two worlds, too human for Atlantis and too strange for the surface. When an underwater civil war threatens to spill into the...
Score
6.9
17
At Eternity’s Gate (2018)
Drama
History
Julian Schnabel's portrait follows Vincent van Gogh through his most prolific and troubled period, when the Dutch painter sought solace in the landscapes of southern France. Wrestling with isolation and...
Score
7.0
18
Murder on the Orient Express (2017)
Crime
Drama
Mystery
When a wealthy American businessman is found dead in his locked compartment aboard the legendary Orient Express, the train becomes a floating locked room. Hercule Poirot, the world's most fastidious...
Score
6.7
19
The Florida Project (2017)
Drama
Shot in the shadow of Walt Disney World, Sean Baker's film follows six-year-old Moonee through a sun-soaked Florida summer of mischief, loud laughter, and wide-eyed discovery. She and her friends...
Score
7.4
20
John Wick (2014)
Action
Thriller
Retirement suited John Wick well enough, until it didn't. He had buried his wife, accepted her parting gift of a beagle puppy, and made his peace with a quieter life....
Score
7.4
21
A Most Wanted Man (2014)
Thriller
Issa Karpov arrives in Hamburg as a ghost, a Chechen Muslim with no papers and a past that intelligence agencies immediately want to pick apart. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Gunther...
Score
6.5
22
The Fault in Our Stars (2014)
Drama
Romance
Two teenagers with cancer meet at a support group and find in each other something neither expected: a reason to live fully in whatever time remains. As their connection deepens,...
Score
7.6
23
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Comedy
Drama
Gustave H. is the kind of immaculately mannered concierge who remembers every guest's favorite perfume and keeps the lobby of the Grand Budapest Hotel running like a Swiss watch. But...
Score
8.0
24
Nymphomaniac: Vol. II (2013)
Drama
Mystery
Where the first volume observed desire with something approaching clinical curiosity, the second turns genuinely cold. Joe's story moves into territory marked by pain, compulsion, and a slow erosion of...
Score
6.7
25
Daybreakers (2010)
Action
Fantasy
Science Fiction
A decade into the future, vampires have inherited the earth. They drive cars, drink coffee laced with blood, and wear suits to work. But the human population is nearly gone,...
Score
6.2
26
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
Adventure
Animation
Comedy
Mr. Fox has a loving family, a cozy tree home, and a respectable newspaper column. What he cannot shake is the itch for something wilder. So he hatches a scheme...
Score
7.8
27
Antichrist (2009)
Drama
Horror
Thriller
A couple retreats to their isolated cabin after devastating loss, hoping solitude will mend their fractured marriage. What begins as an escape into nature spirals into psychological chaos and bodily...
Score
6.6
28
Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Action
Adventure
Science Fiction
Peter Parker has never felt more confident, but confidence has a way of curdling into arrogance. When a strange alien symbiote bonds with him, it amplifies his darker impulses at...
Score
6.5
29
Inside Man (2006)
Crime
Drama
Thriller
A group of masked robbers seizes a Manhattan bank with military precision, and the detective sent to negotiate their surrender arrives carrying baggage of his own. Corruption allegations are nipping...
Score
7.4
30
The Aviator (2004)
Drama
Howard Hughes spent two decades building Hollywood and the skies at the same time, producing landmark films while designing aircraft that broke speed records. Martin Scorsese's portrait of the man...
Score
7.2
31
Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Action
Adventure
Science Fiction
Peter Parker is falling apart. His grades are slipping, his landlord wants him gone, and the girl he loves is moving on with someone else. When he walks away from...
Score
7.3
32
Finding Nemo (2003)
Adventure
Animation
Family
When a small clownfish named Nemo is scooped up by a scuba diver and dropped into a Sydney dentist's fish tank, his anxious father Marlin has no choice but to...
Score
7.8
33
Spider-Man (2002)
Action
Science Fiction
Peter Parker is the kind of kid who gets overlooked in every hallway. Then a single bite from a lab-engineered spider rewires him from the inside out, and suddenly the...
Score
7.3
34
Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
Drama
Horror
In 1922 Berlin, a visionary filmmaker makes a devil's bargain to bring authenticity to his vampire masterpiece. When an actual creature of the night arrives on set, the boundary between...
Score
6.7
35
American Psycho (2000)
Crime
Drama
Thriller
Patrick Bateman has everything Manhattan in the late 1980s promised to reward: the penthouse, the business card stock, the jawline. He is also, beneath the moisturizer and the Valentino suits,...
Score
7.4
36
eXistenZ (1999)
Action
Science Fiction
Thriller
Game designer Allegra Geller has built the most immersive virtual reality system ever conceived, and someone wants her dead for it. Fleeing with a reluctant marketing trainee as her only...
Score
6.8
37
New Rose Hotel (1999)
Drama
Mystery
Science Fiction
Two corporate operatives, one seasoned and one reckless, recruit a beautiful woman to seduce a brilliant scientist away from his employer and into their client's hands. Abel Ferrara adapts William...
Score
5.2
38
The Boondock Saints (1999)
Action
Crime
Thriller
Connor and Murphy MacManus are South Boston Irish-Catholics with a grievance against the city's criminal rot and a conviction that God is on their side. Armed, devout, and increasingly reckless,...
Score
7.3
39
The English Patient (1996)
Drama
Romance
War
A Hungarian cartographer mapping the Sahara in the late 1930s finds himself consumed by something far more dangerous than desert terrain: a doomed love affair that will cost him everything....
Score
7.2
40
Clear and Present Danger (1994)
Action
Drama
Thriller
When a presidential confidant dies under mysterious circumstances, Jack Ryan inherits a sprawling intelligence operation he never sought. His climb through CIA ranks collides with a covert agenda: shadowy operatives...
Score
6.6
41
Body of Evidence (1993)
Drama
Romance
Thriller
When a wealthy older man dies of a heart attack with cocaine in his bloodstream, his younger lover Rebecca Carlson inherits his entire fortune, and suddenly the bedroom looks a...
Score
5.0
42
Wild at Heart (1990)
Crime
Romance
Thriller
Sailor and Lula are young, reckless, and desperately in love. When they flee town to escape Lula's vindictive mother, they embark on a dangerous cross-country odyssey where desire collides with...
Score
7.0
43
Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
Drama
War
Ron Kovic enlists in Vietnam as a true believer, a small-town kid shaped by patriotism and parades. He comes home in a wheelchair, broken in ways the country refuses to...
Score
7.0
44
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
Drama
Martin Scorsese's bold and deeply human portrait imagines Jesus not as a distant icon but as a man crushed under the weight of a destiny he never asked for. Caught...
Score
7.2
45
Platoon (1986)
Action
Drama
War
Chris Taylor volunteered for Vietnam expecting something noble and came back a different person entirely. Oliver Stone's semi-autobiographical war film follows a college dropout thrust into the jungles of Southeast...
Score
7.7
46
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)
Action
Crime
Thriller
Secret Service agent Richard Chance has never been much for playing by the rules, but when a partner is gunned down, restraint disappears entirely. His target is Eric Masters, a...
Score
7.1
47
Heaven’s Gate (1980)
Drama
History
Western
In 1890s Wyoming, a Harvard-educated lawman watches the frontier collapse under the weight of money and murder. Wealthy cattle barons have compiled a kill list of immigrant settlers too poor...
Score
6.8
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the highest-rated movies starring Willem Dafoe?
According to aggregate user scores, the absolute best titles starring Willem Dafoe are Werwulf, Late Fame, and The Phoenician Scheme.
How many movies and TV shows has Willem Dafoe starred in?
Our database currently features a comprehensive filmography of 47 titles starring Willem Dafoe, ranging from their earliest roles to the newest releases.
Are the movies starring Willem Dafoe worth watching?
Yes! The overall filmography starring Willem Dafoe maintains a strong average user rating of 6.9 out of 10 across all tracked titles.