Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe had a memorable moment while working on Yorgos Lanthimos’ upcoming movie And.
A New York Times profile posted online Thursday revealed that Dafoe “motivated himself to come on set,” meaning he would come on set even if he didn’t have to be there. While filming one scene, Stone even slapped the Spider-Man actor about 20 times to make the scene look more real, even though he was supposed to be off-camera. Normally, an actor just moves without his co-star.
“That’s what you expect from actors,” the director told the Times. “Wanting to be there in any way.”
The “La La Land” star explained that Dafoe is the “opposite” of other actors she’s worked with, giving “that instinct for performance that a lot of actors have — the ‘Look at me, look at me!’ a kind of performer.”
“Maybe it’s changed over the years,” she said. “A lot of the actors I work with have been doing it for a long time, and you know they’ve gone from ‘I’ to ‘we’.”
The Florida Project actor went on to explain how his relationship with acting has changed throughout his career. “Once you start working, you use that as a means of survival,” Dafoe said. “And then… it becomes like a spiritual thing – finding your connection with all things.”
A release date has not yet been set for And, and the film’s plot has been kept under wraps. Dafoe and Stone also star in Lanthimos’ upcoming Victorian-set film Poor Things, based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel about Belle Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by an eccentric scientist.