In two decades, Willem Dafoe’s gone from Christ to Antichrist.

Back in 1988, the lean and mean actor played Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ.  Now he’s starring in Lars von Trier’s controversial Cannes and TIFF shocker, Antichrist.

In between, he’s played a variety of characters along the spectrum of saintliness.

First there was his good soldier to Tom Berenger’s bad one in Platoon; then came Max Schreck, the Nosferatu actor who personified evil in Shadow Of The Vampire. Both performances earned him Oscar nominations, although he’s probably most widely known for his turn as the Green Goblin in the Spider-Man movies, one of the creepier comic book villains captured on celluloid.

How can one actor portray such extremes of good and evil?

“I imagine it’s my physicality and my voice,” he says with that distinctive nasal sound, looking lean and compact and perfectly pleasant. “People never quite know where I’m from. They can’t say, ‘This is a guy who votes this way and thinks this way.’ That allows me to make a good ‘other.’”

In Antichrist, he plays an unnamed husband and therapist who’s grieving the death of his infant son.  To help out his distraught wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg), he uses cognitive behaviour therapy, which involves visiting the source of her fears. But the therapy backfires, resulting in a waking nightmare involving confinement, genital torture (ouch!) and the kinds of extreme imagery associated with a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

He admits that making the film got under his skin.

“As I get older things affect me more, which is funny because you think it’d be the other way around, that I’d get more used to it,” says Dafoe, who also stars in TIFF films Daybreakers, L'Affair Farewell and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done. “But I guess sometimes men get more sensitive as they get older. It’s a hormonal thing.”

Dafoe reveals he had fears about the film from the start, most having to do with how von Trier would film certain sections. He also wondered if they’d ever finish the project. After all, the director had begun the film to work through a serious depression.

“He was shaky emotionally,” he says, about the filming. “People who don’t know him might think he’s this smartass sarcastic, overintellectual wunderkind, but that’s not true. He’s got a sincerity and commitment that’s hard to find.”

The reviews, at least for him and Gainsbourg (von Trier came under fire at Cannes), have been positive, with most critics pointing out the actors’ bravery.

“It’s not about being naked, about [showing your] genitals or not,” he says. “To do this movie, even fully dressed, required a certain leap of faith. Lars works without a lot of rehearsal, with a very loose camera and a very unflattering light sometimes, and he requires actors who aren’t interested in promoting themselves but in transforming themselves. If that’s brave, then fine. For me, it’s just the way I work the best.”