Though long celebrated as one of our most versatile screen stars, four-time Academy Award nominee Willem Dafoe might not seem like the obvious choice to portray a swaggering, playboy billionaire modeled on Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
Just ask Willem Dafoe.
“Me? Playing a Greek shipping tycoon?,” the actor tells Variety on a recent visit to Athens. “I don’t think so.”
Dafoe is perhaps selling himself short. But for his latest film, “The Birthday Party,” which premieres Aug. 7 in the Piazza Grande at the Locarno Film Festival, the Wisconsin-born star takes on a new challenge, stepping into the exquisite loafers of a self-made Greek billionaire planning an elaborate birthday fete for his daughter.
Adapted from the novel by U.K.-based Greek author Panos Karnezis, the film is directed by Spain’s Miguel Ángel Jimenéz (“Ori,” “Chaika”) and produced by Greece’s Palme d’Or-winning production outfit Heretic (“Triangle of Sadness”), in co-production with Fasten Films (Spain), Lemming Film (Netherlands) and Raucous Pictures (U.K.). Heretic and Bankside are repping world sales.
Dafoe leads a star-studded cast that includes acclaimed Spanish actor Emma Suárez (“Julieta”), “Peaky Blinders” star Joe Cole, and Danish breakout Vic Carmen Sonne, coming off her scintillating performance in Magnus von Horn’s best international feature film Oscar nominee “The Girl With the Needle.”
At the helm is Dafoe as Marcos Timoleon, a shipping magnate and larger-than-life personality who decides to throw a lavish birthday celebration for Sofia, his daughter and sole heiress, played by Sonne. Set in the 1970s, “The Birthday Party” unfolds over 24 hours on the billionaire’s private island, with the celebration offering a perfect excuse for many of Timoleon’s associates and hangers-on to approach him with their own agendas.
The tycoon, who is used to ruthlessly controlling everything and everyone around him at any cost, is also secretly plotting a major decision on his daughter’s behalf. As the night goes on and the party grows rowdier and more decadent, the duo is set on a collision course that will inevitably lead to a shocking conclusion.
Paying homage to the memorable star turns of Marlon Brando in “The Godfather” and Burt Lancaster in Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard,” Dafoe says he was taken by the “rich portrait” of the shipping magnate at the heart of “The Birthday Party,” and the film’s “examination of the toxicity of the kind of power, the kind of patriarchy” he embodies.
“While I don’t normally respond to family dramas, it’s more than that. It’s very much about family, but…it bites off quite a bit,” Dafoe says. “It’s [about] ambition, legacy. And the thing that makes the guy, it’s also the thing that’s going to take him down, which is such a telling and attractive and true story that I could never get enough of.”
Willem Dafoe (left) and Vic Carmen Sonne in “The Birthday Party.”
Courtesy of Heretic
“The Birthday Party” marks the actor’s second collaboration with Heretic, following his portrayal of a brazen art thief who gets trapped inside a lavish penthouse during a heist gone wrong in Vasilis Katsoupis’ 2023 Berlinale selection “Inside.” It also reunites Jimenéz with the Athens-based production company, a co-producer on his San Sebastian player “Window to the Sea,” which starred Suárez.
For the Spanish director, “the huge distance between my own life and the Timoleon universe was a really appealing challenge for me,” Jimenéz says. Though his own “convictions completely reject this wealthy, brutal, frivolous, false and self-serving caste” characterized by the billionaire and his family, the director was determined to “portray them in the most human and intimate way possible,” resisting the temptation “to ridicule or judge them from the beginning.”
“To be able to portray Marcos Timoleon from Karnezis’ novel, with all his charm and cruelty, to feel him in his silences and doubts, to see him entertain his audience while ruling over them and using his love to justify his insatiable thirst for power — that, for me, was the core of the entire project,” he adds.
It is a complicated portrait — of a man, of a family, of the corrupting influence of wealth and the way it affects everyone in the billionaire’s orbit, including those he loves the most.
“This film talks about power. Corruption. The self. The family. The vulnerability, too,” says Suárez, who stars opposite Dafoe as Timoleon’s wife. “Olivia is a woman who loves in an unconditional way. She’s a strong woman. She knows what she wants. She knows him — she sees him. She can feel his vulnerability, and she wants to save him.”
The movie’s events take place over the course of a single day “with an intensity that’s perfect for our film,” says Cole, who portrays a working-class journalist who inadvertently strikes up a relationship with the billionaire’s daughter while writing his biography. That intensity was matched by Dafoe — “one of the heavyweights of Hollywood and of cinema,” according to Cole — an actor praised by his fellow cast member Sonne for “demand[ing] a certain honesty in all his roles.” Of the four-time Academy Award nominee, producer Karnavas says: “I cannot imagine anyone else playing Marcos Timoleon.”
Vic Carmen Sonne (left) and Joe Cole in “The Birthday Party.”
Courtesy of Heretic
Largely filmed on the Greek island of Corfu, where the billionaire’s “world of opulence” is framed by the “sun-soaked sea,” according to Cole, “The Birthday Party” offers viewers a chance “to take a peek behind the curtain of this family…and all the chaos and lunacy that surrounds them,” the actor says.
At a time when tech billionaires and real-estate moguls turned potentates unabashedly flaunt their wealth with little regard for the lives they ruin, we very well might not like what we see. But as Dafoe notes, “The Birthday Party” is in part a cautionary tale about the times in which we live.
“People build things that, if they aren’t careful, if they don’t have some kind of discrimination and they don’t watch themselves, if they don’t keep a balance…they forget the intention and create a nightmare,” he says. “I think that’s very much what is at stake here.”