Willem Dafoe named Venice Biennale’s theater director
ROME—US actor Willem Dafoe has been appointed artistic director of Venice Biennale’s theater department, organizers said in a statement on Monday.
“I realize that I am known as a film actor, but I was born in the theater, the theater trained me and galvanized me,” Dafoe was quoted as saying in the statement.
“I am a stage animal. I am an actor. Theater taught me about art and life,” said the 68-year-old, who was one of the founders of the Wooster Group, a New-York based experimental theater outfit.
Dafoe, who earned his first Oscar nomination for the 1986 war film “Platoon,” will direct the department for the two-year 2025-2026 period.
The head of the Biennale’s board of directors, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, said that Dafoe’s “perfect control of his body onstage has always stemmed from discipline, knowledge, passion and a profound awareness of the theater.”
Dafoe joined an experimental theater group in Milwaukee at age 19 before training in New York and spending over 20 years performing onstage with the Wooster Group.
Nominations
He made his name with films including “Mississippi Burning,” with Oscar nominations following for his performances in “Shadow of the Vampire” and the Vincent van Gogh biopic “At Eternity’s Gate.”
Dafoe has been nominated for a total of four Oscars and four Golden Globes—the last in 2024 for “Poor Things”—and is in the cast of the opening film at Venice this year, Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
The so-called “Biennale Teatro” was founded in 1934, the fourth category added to the festival after Art, Music and Cinema.
Its yearly festival features daily events highlighting works from the contemporary theater scene. —Reuters
