While he’s incredible at playing a kind-hearted souls in movies like The Florida Project, or Jesus Christ himself in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, he’s often most commonly associated with playing more undesirable characters.
These roles in particular prove that Dafoe has the chops to be one of the most famous villains in cinema history.
And he played one of the most memorably vicious supporting characters in cinema history (at least, in my view) in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart.
Apparently, at one point in the ’80s, there were conversations regarding Dafoe taking on The Joker.