Willem Dafoe's regrets over selling frozen fish fingers

Thanks to an acclaimed, esteemed, eclectic, and illustrious body of work dating back more than 40 years, there’s arguably no such thing as the definitive Willem Dafoe performance, which is exactly the way he likes it.

The actor has always prided himself on trying his hand at everything cinema has to offer, and even though Hollywood has made several attempts to pigeonhole him as a wild-eyed maniac with a penchant for inhaling scenery whole and spitting it back out, there’s plenty of evidence to show he’s equally adept at playing grounded, heart-warming, and comforting characters.

Dafoe has four Academy Award nominations to his name for playing a soldier in Oliver Stone’s Platoon, channelling Max Shreck in Werner Herzog’s Shadow of the Vampire, showcasing his empathetic side in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, and embodying Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate, underlining his unending versatility.

He’s also become a recurring fixture of Wes Anderson’s repertory, hammed it up in four Spider-Man blockbusters, developed longstanding working relationships with independent outsiders Paul Schrader and Abel Ferrara, played Jesus Christ for Martin Scorsese, and had his genitalia crushed by Lars Von Trier.

There’s nothing he can’t or won’t do, but don’t call him the fish fingers guy. In 2010, Dafoe made his debut as the new voice of Birds Eye Fish Fingers, voicing a glove puppet polar bear who lurks inside of a freezer and espouses the nutritional value of the brand’s products in an attempt to convince viewers that buying another – or inferior – frozen fish product was a mistake they’d never recover from gastronomically.

Why did such a renowned character actor and in-demand industry player decide that lending his unmistakable vocals to a string of ads designed to increase fish finger sales was worth his time? Other than money, the answer is integrity, bizarrely. Dafoe shared that the ad agency pitched him the part with the spiel that “he may only be a glove puppet, but he needs integrity.”

Dafoe jumped at the chance to imbue a felt creation with his distinct sense of gravitas, only to be left disheartened by the end product. “When they first pitched the idea to me, it sounded really cool,” he admitted to The Guardian. “I thought it was going to be an animated polar bear inside this refrigerator, scolding people.”

Instead, viewers got a puppet warning shoppers against buying anything other than Birds Eye. “When I saw the glove puppet, that was a head-scratcher,” he confessed. “I guess people found the charm in it.” In terms of where fish finger adverts stand in terms of his legacy, Dafoe was quick to point out, “That’s not my main work.”

He may not want to be remembered as the voice of the Birds Eye polar bear, but the strange thing is that those ads probably introduced a lot of viewers to Dafoe for the first time. Imagine somebody watching Poor Things for the first time and realising they know the deranged Godwin Baxter from his praise of fish fingers; it’s enough to make a cinephile sick.

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