Willem Dafoe

Willem Dafoe spent more than twenty-five years as a member of the Wooster Group, an experimental theater company in New York, performing in a converted garage in SoHo while his film career took off. Even as he played Jesus for Martin Scorsese, a sergeant in Platoon and the Green Goblin in Spider-Man, he kept returning to the ensemble. He has said he thinks of himself first as a collaborator, and his career bears that out.

His chart is split between two houses, and both are crowded. He was born at 7:30 p.m. on July 22, 1955, in Appleton, Wisconsin, according to his birth record. The Sun, Mercury, Venus and Uranus, all in Cancer, fill his sixth house, which astrologers associate with daily routine, training and craft. The Moon in Virgo and Mars, Jupiter and Pluto in Leo fill the seventh, where collaborators and close working partners are read. Astrologers would see a life organized around the work itself and the people he makes it with, and few actors have worked more consistently with the same directors. He has made multiple films with Abel Ferrara, Lars von Trier, Wes Anderson, Paul Schrader and Yorgos Lanthimos.

He grew up in Appleton as one of eight children of a surgeon and a nurse, and took the name Willem as a teenager. After a brief stint at the University of Wisconsin, he moved to New York and joined the Wooster Group. His film breakthrough came with Platoon in 1986, which earned him his first Academy Award nomination. Later nominations came for Shadow of the Vampire, in which he played the silent-film actor Max Schreck playing a vampire, The Florida Project, and At Eternity's Gate, as Vincent van Gogh.

The Ascendant has only just crossed into Aquarius, the sign of the outsider and the experimenter. It suits a man who has spent his career between Hollywood and the avant-garde, and whose angular face and intensity have made him one of cinema's most memorable villains and misfits. The sixth-house Cancer planets show up in his famously rigorous regime of yoga, diet and daily practice.

Saturn sits in Scorpio in the ninth house, which governs belief, philosophy and long journeys of the mind. Scorpio is dark, intense and drawn to the forbidden, and Saturn there describes a serious, lifelong engagement with difficult ideas. Dafoe's filmography is full of strange, transgressive and morally complex roles, and he has said he is drawn to work that frightens him.

His Moon is in Virgo, precise and devoted to craft, and it sits among the seventh-house planets, a fit for an actor known for meticulous preparation and for disappearing into collaborations.

In his late sixties he was as busy as ever, with Poor Things and Robert Eggers's Nosferatu, and in 2024 he was named artistic director of the theater section of the Venice Biennale. The planets in the sixth and seventh houses kept doing what they have always done: the daily work, and the right people to do it with.