Willem Dafoe Is Adamant About His ‘Poor Things’ Character: Don’t Call Him a Mad Scientist!

In “Poor Things,” a movie that glories in strange characters, Willem Dafoe gives Emma Stone a run for her money as the strangest of them all – and maybe he gets extra points because his strange character essentially created her strange character.

Dafoe plays Dr. Godwin Baxter, who was experimented upon by his father as a child in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ twisted version of Victorian England, based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray. Baxter, his face and body riddled with scars and deformities because of his father’s quest to figure out what a human body can do, finds himself drawn to experimentation of his own, and ends up creating a young woman, Bella (Stone), by transplanting a baby’s brain into the body of her mother, who died in childbirth.