American actor Willem Dafoe received the Wind of Europe Award at the Ventotene Film Festival on July 25, 2020. Ventotene is a small Mediterranean island known for its ancient Roman harbor. Dafoe, 65, considers himself partly Italian, having been married since 2005 to Giada Colagrande, an Italian film director. Dafoe’s love story with Italy itself goes back many years: he has been a steady presence at the Venice Film Festival through the decades, and he won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor there in 2018 for his portrayal of Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate (for which he received his fourth Oscar nomination – the first one was for Platoon in 1986 – and his third Golden Globe nod). Recently seen in The Lighthouse, Dafoe is a hard-working actor, able to alternate big and small productions and to adjust effortlessly to both mainstream fare and the most experimental auteur cinema. He is an artist in many senses, as his love for painting – of which he talks in this interview – attests.

We talked to Dafoe via Zoom from his home in Rome, where he spent the lockdown period, to talk about Ventotene, where At Eternity’s Gate was screened under the stars, and about his future projects.