A director stopped Willem Dafoe from getting his phallus out on set and replaced him with a stunt double for a pretty hilarious reason.
You’ll probably best recognise the actor from hits such as Spider Man (2002) and Spider Man: No Way Home (2021) and Poor Things (2023).
However, if you look further back into the 69-year-old’s career, he has many more movies under his belt, one of which would have had you seeing a lot more of him had things gone a little differently.
While Dafoe has taken on roles in some major blockbuster movies, he’s also featured in various arthouse films such as Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.
In the 2009 movie, Dafoe took on the role of an unnamed married man simply credited as ‘He’, alongside Charlotte Gainsbourg’s ‘She’.
And well, there’s quite a lot of nudity involved in the movie – and that’s putting it lightly.
However, rather than director Lars Von Trier getting the main actors to both strip down fully for the role, Dafoe wasn’t actually allowed to get his actual penis out for the nude scenes, the film employing a stand-in actor for those scenes.
But why?
Willem Dafoe portrayed ‘he’ in Antichrist (Nordisk Film)
In a 2009 interview with The Boston Phoenix, the acclaimed director said the star was ‘so large’ that it ‘left people confused’ – prompting him to bring in another body.
“As for Dafoe… he has an enormous d**k. We had to take those scenes out of the film,” he explained. “We had a stand-in for him because we had to take the scenes out with his own d**k.”
When asked to elaborate on the decision, Von Trier said: “We had to, because Will’s was too big.”
The director was quizzed further by the publication on whether Defoe’s penis had been too big to fit on the screen, which the director denied.
“No, too big because everybody got very confused when they saw it.”
Whatever that means, who knows, but it’s pretty hilarious.
A stand-in was used for the actor on the 2009 movie (Nordisk Film)
And unsurprisingly, the revelation led to a lot of jokes being made about Dafoe’s member.
When asked about what he thought about all of the comments being made about his phallus. the actor reflected to Vulture: “I mean, it’s fine if that’s what they want to focus on. It’s a movie that I think is beautiful and was a joy to make. But I can only make it. If people want to make that the thing they want to talk about, it’s distressing, but that’s their business.”
