Willem Dafoe knew the script for Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” was different the moment he read it. It was teeming with big themes — identity, social convention, hubris and human attachment. It was also fantastical and often funny. But Dafoe, a four-time Oscar nominee known for his soulful, cerebral presence, has been doing this long enough to know the page is just the starting block. “Scripts have to be put on their feet,” he says in a video interview from his home in Rome. And Dafoe was ready to help “Poor Things” stand up on the screen.“It’s about collaboration,” he says. “It’s about melting into the thing, becoming the thing, not having it be about you, but also having it be intensely personal. I think it’s a chance to lose yourself in something bigger. That means these people coming together to tell a story or express a world or express a hope. And I’m down with that. That’s what makes it fun to get up in the morning.”Dafoe is primed to score his fifth nomination for his performance as Dr. Godwin Baxter, a Victorian scientist and surgeon bearing scars inside and out. Baxter’s favorite creation is Bella (Emma Stone), a young woman who survived a suicide attempt only to begin a new life in the strangest of ways: Baxter, called God by those around him, has given her the brain of her unborn child. Paternal, protective, by turns gruff and caring, and more or less insane, the good doctor is the latest take on Victor Frankenstein, the mad scientist of Mary Shelley’s archetypal horror novel. When Bella leaves to sow some wild oats with a caddish lawyer (Mark Ruffalo), Baxter pines for his creation even as he knows she must become her own human being.https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2023-12-19/for-willem-dafoe-awards-do-matter-if-it-helps-the-work-like-poor-things-get-seen?utm_id=121931&sfmc_id=2423239&skey_id=2eebe6736d82108e0e2dfe97c6fe9505f8ab76c35444083605954814f11d8c73 (ICE LOS ANGELES)

Fonte notizia: Los Angeles Times