Willem Dafoe: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

4. Bobby Peru - Wild At Heart (1990)

24 years before The Fault in Our Stars, Dafoe and Laura Dern enjoyed a very different kind of on-screen relationship under the guiding hand of David Lynch. Dafoe has always been good at playing grotesque, slippery or gruesome characters, and was creeping out his audiences long before he landed the role of the Green Goblin. But for pure skin-crawling hideousness, his performance as Bobby Peru takes quite a beating. Based on the novel by Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart is a romance between Elvis-loving criminal Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and speed metal fan Lula Pace Fortune (Dern). After Sailor is released from prison for murdering a man that Lula's mother sent to kill him, the couple go on the run from North Carolina to California to start their new life together. But Lula's mother (Dern's real-life mother Diane Ladd) has other plans, dispatching a number of ruthless and bizarre assassins to kill Sailor and bring Lula back. If Eraserhead is Lynch's version of The Philadelphia Story, then Wild at Heart is his take on The Wizard of Oz. It's a very strange and uneven film in which L. Frank Baum's story is thrown together with a celebration of all things Americana, resulting in a film which is both memorable and disturbing. Dafoe's performance has both of these qualities, with some of the worst teeth of any American villain and one of the most gruesome deaths. But above all it's his sadistic, cruel enjoyment of toying with Dern's character which makes him stick in our minds. Dafoe commits to a scary degree, creeping us out while earning our respect.