Fans Pay Tribute to Willem Dafoe on his 65th Birthday

Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe celebrated his birthday today and movie fans were eager to wish him well as he turned 65. Born July 22, 1955 in Appleton, Wisconsin, Dafoe has been nominated for four Academy Awards (Platoon, Shadow of the Vampire, The Florida Project, and At Eternity’s Gate) but is best known to many fans for collaborating with director Wes Anderson and his work in genre films like The Boondock Saints, Aqauman, Finding Nemo, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. Overall he’s had a unique and versatile career, as the responses to fans finding out that today is his birthday can attest.

“Sam Raimi did a miracle thing, he made kind of a personal film out of a fairly big sized, partly-effect movie,” Dafoe told GQ in a retrospective on his career, highlighting the Spider-Man films in particular. “It was before, early in the game from movies of comic books and that sort of thing so there was no template. I loved in Spider-Man particularly playing the double role. Everybody thinks about the Green Goblin, and that was fun, but the more interesting role was probably the father, Norman Osborn.”

He added, “Because you could play these scenes where it would switch from comedy to drama in a line. I think of the scene where they have a Thanksgiving dinner. There’s a couple of scenes that still make me laugh, because they’re so double-edged, and they go back and forth between being really heavy and really kind of silly. And the movie is filled with that.”

Check out some of the hilarious birthday wishes to Dafoe below.