Willem Dafoe Warns Trump As Star Launches Venice Theater Programme

EXCLUSIVE: Willem Dafoe warns about the U.S. government’s interference in the arts.

He expresses surprise in President Trump, who “for someone that supposedly wants to limit government, the government has all of a sudden become very invasive,” in culture.

The movie star and theatre actor insists that Trump must “let the people do their art, let the art talk.”  He adds: “We can develop our sense of compassion and responsibility socially, leave that to the people.” 

Dafoe spoke to me as he launched the Venice Biennale’s 53rd International Theater Festival for which he has a two-year appointment as artistic director.

I ask him about the dangers of Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., where he has installed himself as the artistic director of the fabled cultural institution.

“Well, there’s many,” he muses. “And it’s not just about bad theater. I can’t imagine Donald Trump programming a good series of performances at the Kennedy Center. I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole here.”

I don’t want to get you into trouble, I tell him. He waves that away. “I don’t mind trouble,” he responds.

Theater is Dafoe’s first love, and for him, all the world’s a stage.

The last time we met, we were both salivating over the lemon pizza served at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, now we’re salivating over his programme for the festival.

The Oscar-nominated star sees it as “a great opportunity to programme some really interesting things and be around some people that are very inspiring and try to make a difference, to give a platform for something that in one concentrated area, things that matter to me. So it’s a real gift.”

Theater, he tells me, “totally defined me, not only in working daily on making pieces, but also my approach to performing.”

Defoe’s selection includes a performance by The Wooster Group, the experimental troupe the 69-year-old has been associated with since he first walked through the doors of its headquarters in Soho, New York, when he was in his early twenties. 

His friend and one-time partner, Elizabeth LeCompte, who co-founded Wooster Group with Spalding Gray (Swimming to Cambodia), will honor New York avant-garde pioneer Richard Foreman, who died in January.

Le Compte will create — she calls herself a “theatre creator” rather than a director — a production of Foreman’s 1988 play Symphony For Rats, which, as it happens, features a deranged president.

“It’s an old piece, but it has special resonance,” Dafoe says with a grin. Symphony For Rats will have its European premiere at the festival on May 31.

The following night, June 1, LeCompte will receive the festival’s Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement.

Dafoe, who enjoyed a long association with Foreman and his Ontological Hysteric Theater, will also take to the stage with what he terms a “performative experiment,” called No title, a piece that Foreman wrote last year.

Foreman got in touch with Dafoe when he was not well, he was in a wheelchair. “But he wanted to do a recording of some writing that he had done. And the thing that was interesting about Richard is sometimes he would just simply write down phrases that interested him, that were resonant for him or curious to him take all these phrases and he’d kind of cut and paste them without any sense of character or mise en scene, and he’d make a play out of that,” Dafoe explains.

The piece is basically a text without particular direction or without particular character. ”And then he’d get the actors… he’d say, ‘Willem, you read these three lines, Kate, you read these two, Bob, you read this one.’  And it was a very eccentric way of working, but was very beautiful because you see out of a randomness, stories would be made, new connections that weren’t typical connections would happen.”

Phrases such as “tomorrow never comes” or “flat-foot floozie” would be written on index cards and Foreman would shuffle them like playing cards. “We split them and then we’d go back and forth with the phrases, and sometimes they connect and sometimes they don’t. And it’s interesting to see how that happens. So it’s a living experiment. And then after one round you reshuffle the cards and you do it again, and everything has a new meaning.”

Dafoe tells me that he and Italian actress Simonetta Solder (A Beautiful Imperfection, Love Wedding Repeat), will perform No title.  “It’s an interesting exercise in language and conversation and psychology… It’s very rich, it’s very simple. There’s nothing but this game,” he says.

The piece will include  snippets of a recording he and Foreman shot last year and then he and Solder will perform the work live, mostly in English “and then we’ll do a little part with the cards in Italian.”

Theater is vital to Dafoe, and a lifeblood for society. “I think it’s important as a place to come together and see where we’re at and what could happen. Because somewhere between the pandemic and advances in technology, everybody’s living in their own little bubble,” he tells me during our exclusive interview.

“So the discourse comes sometimes a little blocked, and that has a negative effect sometimes because other people can take care of business when everybody’s busy in their little world. So theater represents a place to, in a very vital way, come together and reflect on where we are and think about a different reality than the one that’s given to us virtually.”

He continues: “So it’s a very concrete meeting of people in a place, finding their commonality, finding their differences, finding out hopefully a better way to live.”

Dafoe’s programme will look back over the past 50 years that has shaped theatre at the Biennale.

He will honor those who were involved in the seminal 1975 Biennale Teatro, which was directed by  the late Luca Ronconi, the renowned Italian actor, and theatre, film and opera director widely hailed as the “cornerstone of the experiences of new theater” 

The Festival will acknowledge the work of some of the artists who participated.

They include Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley of the Odin Teatret, a theatre laboratory created in Olso, Norway in 1964, although it moved to Denmark two years later. They will be in Venice with their most recent work, Le nuvole di Amleto. 

Thomas Richards, who was the “essential collaborator” for 13 years with influential experimental theater artist Polish-born Jerry Grotowski, who died in 1999, will also be there. Richards will present the European premiere of Inanna through his new company Theatre no Theatre.

Romeo Castellucci, the Italian theatre director, playwright artist, designer who has previously collaborated with Dafoe, will stage the world premiere of a site-specific creation, I mangiatori di patate, on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, a one time leper colony located a few metres away from the western tip of the Venice Lido. 

In fact, Dafoe’s thrilled at the prospect of using many different kinds of spaces, such as some grand palazzos but also the “beautiful buildings that were once used for the heavy shipping and boating, transport, things like that. And they’re beautiful spaces, and now they’ve been converted into beautiful places for people to congregate and perform.”

More contemporary theatre artists, such as Thomas Ostermeier, the director of the Schaubühne in Berlin, will present the Italian premiere of Changes by Maja Zade. The play, about a couple confronting societal pressures at home and at work, originated at the Schaubühne last November. Between them, its two cast members play 23 characters. 

Ostermeier’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull is currently running at London’s  Barbican, starring Cate Blanchett and Tom Burke, who can also be seen in Steven Soderbergh’s spy feature Black Bag. The Seagull also stars Emma Corrin, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Paul Bazely. Just to be clear: It won’t be in Venice.

Milo Rau, the artistic director of the Vienna Festival, will be in Venice with his new work The Seer, starring Swiss actress Ursina Lardi, star of Michael Haneke’s Cannes Palmed’Or winner The White Ribbon. Lardi plays a war photographer who travels to conflict areas around the world blithely seeking images of dread. Her views change when she is subjected to violence herself. 

Rau bases his play on the life stories of war photographers, Iraqi citizens and includes the story of a teacher, Hassan Azad, who, while working in Mossul, had his hand severed as punishment during the Islamic State occupation.

Rau asks: “What remains when war and terror destroy the world as we know it,” and wonders whether “art can soothe suffering?”

 Lardi will receive the Silver Lion trophy at a ceremony at the festival on June 14.

Davide Iodice, from the Primavera die Teatri in Casrovillari, will present his puppet Pinocchio, whose subtitle “What is a person,” performed by the  “different”  young people who are affected with Down syndrome, autistic spectrum disorder, Williams syndrome, or Asperger syndrome, who bring onstage many possible Pinocchios. The character of Pinocchio, notes Iodice, “is the different, he is all the people who are different, with their anarchic and disruptive charge.” 

Dafoe tells me he saw the show in Naples “and I was moved and engaged from the very moment it started.”

There are many other theatre folk participating in performances, lectures, workshops, exhibitions and video installations. There are no Brits on your list, I say. The birthplace of Shakespeare and everything, what’s going on?

With a guffaw, he says, “Well, I asked a couple, but they were too busy, I guess.”

When he sees the inconsolable look on my face, he smiles. “My dear,” he tells me, ”I asked, it’s on them, maybe next year. Okay?”

For his inaugural stint, he says that he didn’t want to travel the globe “shopping” for projects, rather he wanted to programme artists he knew or whose work he admired.

For 2026, he says “I’ve already been traveling to places of theater that I don’t necessarily know, but the buzzword at this point, I’m still forming on my idea about theaters that really serve a community.”

And he plans to commission new works to be performed.

Off-stage, Dafoe’s preparing to star with Tom Hiddleston in Tenzing, the story of Sherpa Tenzing Norway and his historic summit of Mount Everest in 1953 alongside Edmund Hillary, to be portrayed by Hiddleston.

Dafoe will play Colonel John Hunt, the head of the Expedition. “And we will be training and we’ll be climbing some mountains. So I’m excited. It’ll be an adventure,” he says.

The film’s being directed by Jennifer Peedom, who directed the superb documentary, Sherpa, for which Dafoe voiced the commentary. Dafoe says the film has a “beautiful” script by Luke Davies, who wrote the Oscar-nominated movie Lion.