2017 Muriel Awards: Best Supporting Performance, 3rd Place

Willem Dafoe - The Florida Project [313 points / 31 votes]

"I’m not gonna say if we were drinking or not, but my friend Evan Crean who co-hosts the terrific Spoilerpiece Theatre Podcast recently explained to me his theory as to why Willem Dafoe should win Best Supporting Actor for The Florida Project. 'Nobody worked harder than Dafoe all year,' Evan enthused, 'Every scene, this guy was busting his ass! He moved broken ice machines into crummy elevators, he threw bedbug-infested mattresses into dumpsters, he re-painted the whole side of that fucking building pink! Willem *worked* for this role!'

"Manual labor aside, Sean Baker’s remarkable melodrama gave Dafoe maybe the trickiest job in movies last year because it was up to our longtime screen veteran to anchor a cast of wildly gifted and totally green first-time actors, rolling with their improvisations and imperfections in order to ground the movie in identifiable truths, at times almost lassoing scenes into shape by his sheer force of will. Like his character tending to a wayward flock in a ramshackle welfare motel, Dafoe provides structure and sanity to The Florida Project. It’s impossible to imagine the movie without him.

"Of course he’s been a marvel for more than three decades, playing Satan in Wild Billy Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. and Jesus in Oliver Stone’s Platoon, then Jesus again in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Satan’s idiot cousin in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Dafoe’s wild eyes and high-set cheekbones have always given him an extra-worldly aura (my little sister was terrified of him when we were kids and used to beg me to change the channel whenever he was on TV) so maybe Baker’s biggest triumph was to cast him as a regular, decent fella.

"Dafoe is the flummoxed Mr. Wilson to the motel’s roving pack of Dennis The Menaces, but he’s also the movie’s moral compass. Here’s a guy who knows he can’t solve all the problems of the world but he sure does love these little kids who are a massive pain in his ass. Watch how slowly Dafoe builds in the show-stopping sequence during which he spots a pedophile and pulls him away from the children. He babbles and vamps, luring the creeper far enough away to bring the smack down without these kids seeing him do so, trying desperately to preserve whatever’s left of their innocence for just one more day." ~ Sean M. Burns