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Willem Dafoe, seen here on Feb. 4, 2019, looks as if he is constantly sizing you up.MARIO ANZUONI/Reuters

Willem Dafoe is going to murder you. Not really, probably. But if there is one overwhelming vibe that the prolific actor delivers on-screen, it is a sinister one. It is as if the man is constantly sizing you up, his Cheshire-cat grin and tight features especially capable of quickly but carefully calculating when would be the exact right time to complete some sort of dastardly plan. This seemingly inherent evil has served Dafoe’s career well, whether he’s exploiting it (from 1985′s To Live and Die in L.A., his breakthrough bad-guy role, through the first John Wick film) or subverting it (2017′s The Florida Project). With this weekend’s release of The Lighthouse, though, Dafoe gets to play both sides of the coin.

Reviews of movies opening this week, including the anti-hate satire Jojo Rabbit, suffocating The Lighthouse and sentimental Pain and Glory

In Robert Eggers’s new black-and-white genre-twister, Dafoe plays Thomas, a lighthouse keeper in 1890s New England who is either the salvation or doom of his young new assistant Ephraim (Robert Pattinson). As Thomas and Ephraim go about their back-breaking work, and as a storm threatens to leave them isolated for weeks on end, an oozy and intoxicating mania starts to set in. As the men’s situation deteriorates, the crusty but sturdy Thomas could be generously regarded as both hero and villain to Ephraim’s wobbly novice. Whatever the case, Thomas is certainly the more confidently flatulent of the pair (there’s a deadly-but-hardly silent joke in here that Eggers’s script blessedly avoids, which should be expected from the mind behind the 2015 horror sensation The Witch.)

Ahead of The Lighthouse’s Canadian release, Dafoe spoke with The Globe’s Barry Hertz about the extremes of acting.

What was it about Eggers’s The Witch that made you want to seek him out? His sense of world-building?

You put your finger on it with world-building, because there you had a period film that was so easy to enter. Often in those types of films, you have that filmmaker taking you out of the experience of the film because they’re always pointing out things, reassuring you of certain details, and it’s in your face. But Robert has such a good sense of the story and the visual language you need to tell that story that he makes a world that feels as if you are there. And the performances, well normally in period films they feel very theatrical. In [The Witch], they were very rooted. He takes this exotic experience and makes it feel very natural, very easy to enter.

When you were reading his script for The Lighthouse, did you have a sense of how extreme it would play, visually speaking? There are some incredibly disturbing and haunting moments here.

So, the first thing you read is that it’s going to be filmed in black and white and with this particular aspect ratio and filmed with these antique lenses – he was very clear about the visual language. It was very designed and ambitious, and he knew he had to prepare all the shots ahead of time. That was the language, and the job was to submit to that language. That sounds restrictive, but it’s quite good because for us as performers it offers clear structure and a clear understanding of what we had to do.

Regarding what you had to do, I read that the rehearsal process for this was rigorous, and that there was natural tension between your approach and that of Pattinson …

Sure, you know there's natural tension because there's natural tension between the characters. I'm not just being polite – there was no personal animosity. And this is a two-hander, so we're playing scenes together and we're helping each other all the time. We both have a similar work ethic, too: we both like to roll up our sleeves. People ask this question about different approaches, and it's a little hard to explain because people try to understand and then say, "Oh so you're acting and Robert is doing a Method thing. You're Laurence Olivier and he's Dustin Hoffman." People often make that comparison, not as a judgment of the performances, but to try to understand the different approaches. But it's not exactly like that. [Robert] felt like if he rehearsed too much, if he knew what was going to happen, he would feel self-conscious. He didn't want to prepare because he thought that would blunt the spontaneity. I come from theatre, and had a lot of those huge speeches that you had to be prepared for to some degree. I'm used to repeating things – the whole job is to reanimate things. There's no such thing as repeating things. He didn't want to play the scales, and he didn't have to. I had to play the scales.

It sounds like it was an extraordinarily physically challenging experience. One of the film’s strongest moments is when your character is delivering a monologue while you’re being buried in dirt.

[Laughs] That was challenging. That was quite extreme. You’re wedded to the action. It’s actually happening. I’m talking and concentrating on expressing something while someone is throwing dirt in my mouth. You’ve got a little fear there, because you’re worried about choking, and it’s a Pavlovian thing. If I laid you totally cold in your underwear lying in freezing-cold water at the bottom of a grave, believe me, you’d give a great performance.

This film could be greeted as either a dark comedy or a phantasmagorical horror. The reaction of my audience was spiked with laughter. How do you view it?

This movie is complex and rich enough that people are going to see it in different ways. But clearly there are moments of comedy. People often refer to the flatulence, that it seems like a cheap joke. But it has roots in what we're dealing with here, this very black comedy.

Do you feel you’re at a place in your career where you’re able to solely pursue directors who you want to work with, that you don’t have to wait for people to come to you?

It’s both. When I was at the beginning of my career and I was a young actor who wanted to approach a young director, that’s a different dynamic. Now there’s someone out there like Rob who knows my work. But whenever you see a movie you respond to, you want to be in the room with that person. It’s different now that I’m further down the line in my career in relationship to Rob, but I will work – no, I know I will work with Rob Eggers again.

This movie feels to me like it’s a roommates-from-hell story, and that’s valid from either character’s perspective. I think we all have one story like that from our lives …

Not for me, let's hope not, because I've never had a roommate. I've only had a spouse and companions. I've done okay.

The Lighthouse opens Oct. 25

This interview has been condensed and edited

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