Interview: Willem Dafoe on Curating the Venice Biennale Theater Season and Honoring Richard Foreman

From his early days as a founding member of the Wooster Group to his acclaimed film performances in Platoon, The Florida Project, Shadow of the Vampire, and Poor Things, Willem Dafoe has built a career defined by artistic risk-taking. Now, as the artistic director of the Venice Biennale’s 2025-26 theater seasons, he is curating a bold exploration of theatrical expression.

Dafoe’s first slate brings together longtime collaborators such as Romeo Castellucci, Elizabeth LeCompte and the Wooster Group, and the late Richard Foreman, alongside emerging voices and international innovators. His focus is on stripping theater down to its fundamental elements: body, poetry, and ritual.

In this conversation, he discusses his vision for the Biennale, his enduring fascination with avant-garde theater, and No Title, a tribute to Foreman built around a uniquely improvised dialogue of shuffled phrases—an experiment in theatrical spontaneity that defies predictability. Just like the theater he loves best.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

People know you, obviously, from your film work, but fewer people realize your extensive theater background. How did you get started with the Wooster Group and Richard Foreman and that scene?
Just practically speaking, I wasn’t a trained actor. I had done some theater work; I traveled a little bit with a company from the Midwest. We had gone to the Mickery Theatre in Amsterdam, which was a great experience because they brought in stuff from all around the world, so my eyes were opened to something beyond plays.

When I arrived in New York, I found myself going to loft performances, dances, hanging out in galleries, things like that. I started to have a broader view of what I thought theater could be. Then I started working with the Wooster Group, and that absolutely formed me. The Wooster Group always had a great admiration for Richard Foreman, and I would always go to his shows. That was just the world I was living in.

I saw you in Foreman’s Idiot Savant when I was in college. I think it was my first exposure to seeing his work live, and it certainly expanded my view of what theater was to that point.
He was a great theatermaker. When I was an audience member at his shows, I was always in a weird state of bliss because everything confused me, but I was totally engaged. You gotta see his plays live because they don’t live on the page, certainly. And there are plenty of things in his dialogues that, after performing them, they stay with you forever.

In broad terms, what were your goals in terms of programming this season and inviting companies like the Wooster Group to perform?
Basically, I wanted to present things that were specific, unique, special, and essential about theater. Just to order my thoughts, I said theater is body, poetry, and ritual. Those things are all essential parts that theater engages with.

Practically speaking, I got the appointment in June, so I had to work fast, so I went to people that I’ve worked with, people that I admired, and people whose work I kept going back to. The Wooster Group is still doing incredible work, so I wanted to invite Liz [LeCompte] because she’s a director that’s been making incredible work for 50 years that continues to evolve. She does incredible research into new technologies and new ways of performing without leaving the performer behind. It’s just great theater. The bulk of the selection are those people.

Tell me about No Title, the new Richard Foreman piece you’re performing.
Richard Foreman died in January. He wasn’t well, but last year, he had me come over to his house to do a recording. He’d written phrases on hundreds of index cards. They were expressions, fragments. Sometimes they were totally enigmatic, sometimes they were silly, sometimes they were philosophical. We shuffled the cards, Richard took half, I took half, and we went back and forth reading them. What was interesting was to see how a dialogue came together, given the change in our rhythm, given the randomness. It was a beautiful study of actor impulse, improvisation, words, text.

That was recorded, and when he passed, I really wanted to do something in tribute to him. I enlisted the help of an Italian actress, Simonetta Solder, and we’re basically going to do that. We’ll play a piece of what Richard and I did, and then we’ll shuffle the cards, she’ll take half, I’ll take half, then we’ll do it back and forth, shuffle the cards again, do it back and forth again, and then we’ll do a third run, but in Italian. It’s an experiment because of the randomness of it. It’s a living thing. Anything could happen.

What is it about this style of avant-garde theater that has interested you more than traditional plays?
A traditional play is basically a piece of literature. You get some people, they put it on their feet, there’s usually a narrative, there are characters. If we throw it all out, what do we have left? And I maintain that we have a lot. Sometimes, that gets in the way of what the beauty of theater is. I guess I’m attracted to non-traditional structure, non-traditional mise-en-scène. You shouldn’t have to sit through a boring second act to get to the juicy dramatic scene in the third act, you know? And it should be something that makes you think in a new way, frees you from a certain kind of identification. It liberates you.

Do you still enjoy performing live?
I still do. I haven’t done it lately. I think the last one was probably six years ago. I’m very busy with nice opportunities in film, so it makes it difficult. And also, I’m spoiled by my years working with a company or working with really great directors like Foreman or Roman Castellucci or Bob Wilson.

I’m talking to some of the people that I’m presenting now about working with them. It’s just about finding the right piece at the right time. But I will. I yearn to work in theater. I like the idea of waking up and knowing that you’re going to have a performance and that whatever happens in the day is going to inform that performance. It’s a beautiful way to indirectly marry your work with your personal life.

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