Willem Dafoe doesn’t care about realism and neither do I

What can I say? We’re just two weirdos, taking big swings against category norms.

Tender, Thirsty, Ambitious is a newsletter from romance author Rosie Danan about savoring the good stuff, looking respectfully, and building a creative practice that embraces unapologetic striving.

Volume 14, Week of April 2nd, 2025

TENDER– savoring the good stuff

grateful for The Philadelphia Inquirer. The news is borderline unbearably right now, but I want to stay as engaged as I can. I’ve switched the majority of my consumption from scrolling on social media (can you believe the site formerly known as Twitter was once a semi-reliable source of news from verified journalists??) to supporting local, independent journalism via my city’s newspaper. If you have this option, which I recognize is a luxury in this day and age, I highly recommend it. 

I get a handy, easy to read email newsletter from the Inquirer every morning with headlines and links, and from there I can click through depending on what I feel I can handle that day. Reading the paper (again, online, as an email newsletter — how v millennial of me) has helped me zoom in and focus on my community. Reading about local restaurants opening and baseball season predictions and focusing on local educators and how they’re fighting against defunding efforts helps me feel more connected to the people and place where I live.

grateful that my husband showed me how to make my iPhone screen display in black and white*. Okay, here me out. I originally made fun of him for doing this as another step in his never ending quest to get his screen time as low as possible—like yes, I know my phone is slowly eating away at my attention span and mental health—but also!! that’s where all my Internet friends and books live. However, I am sorry to say, this easy settings tweak does make me look at my phone way less and in turn feel better :( 

The upside: Every day I get one step closer to my teenage dream of owning an analog Nokia like the ones they had in Charlie’s Angels (2000). 

*If you too want to try making your phone more boring: go to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters, then turn on Color Filters and select Grayscale. This will change your screen to shades of gray.

grateful that the library auto-renewed the physical titles that I checked out last month. I’m not sure if this is an all-library thing or a special feature of my local branch but the day before my books were due back I got an email that the library had auto-renewed them on my behalf (I was gonna return them on the due date, i swear). But this nice feature saved me a trip (I had not finished either title yet) and a potential late fee and it just felt really nice. Like the library was taking care of me!! As always, LIBRARIES RULE. Don’t sleep on getting yourself a library card!

THIRSTY – looking respectfully 👀

I saw Steven Yeun’s face on screen in passing this week and I’ve been thinking about him ever since!

#what a man what a man what a man what a mighty good man #his beauty and his talent are equal do you know how rare that is?? #we love a short king  #a man capable of a subtle performance — revolutionary #ive never even seen the walking dead but i know what happens to my sweet prince and i’ll never forgive them

AMBITIOUS – unapologetic creative striving

OK, I’m gonna be honest that I do not spend a lot of time on YouTube. No shade to YouTube or anyone who enjoys it. It’s just not a platform that I have picked up. That said, my husband—and I can’t believe how much I’m talking about him in this newsletter. He’s going to be so annoyingly thrilled—was watching this video the other night and unlike 99% of the content that he consumes I found it immediately interesting. 

The video was made by Thomas Flight, who does, as far as I can tell, film analysis. He has many more followers than I do so I do not feel bad about not learning more about him. The man is not hard up for views. 

Anyway, the video is about the work of Willem Dafoe and the reason I immediately tuned in is because the language that Flight was using to describe Dafoe’s performance was familiar: “unhinged” “self-indulgent” “over-the-top” —I thought to myself, “Hey, those are all things that people have said about Fan Service!” 

And I won’t lie, part of the reason I’m so sensitive to these adjectives is that they’re not necessarily complimentary. They could be! And often I think people tagging me in reviews are using them in that way. I will even say that I strive to take them as complimentary regardless of intent, because those words are true to my ambitions and interests and process as a creator and I have used them to describe Fan Service myself, here. But still. You don’t often see or hear “unhinged” “self-indulgent” “over-the-top” used to describe art that people take seriously. 

Flight remarks on this in his Dafoe video. He talks about how most performances today strive for naturalism and are praised for how close they can get to reality or “feeling real.” He details the rise of this preference in style from theaters intent in previous ages to “create something larger than life. Something other than reality.” 

I never really thought about Willem Dafoe before watching this video (that i’ve now watched 3x in as many weeks). If you brought him up to me, I would have had the immediate reference point of his performance as the Green Goblin in the Toby Maguire Spiderman.

And yeah, I would have said that performance was great. I might have even remarked upon the theatricality of it. The physical commitment to the bit. 

But now? Post-Flight’s analysis, I have a new appreciation for Dafoe as an artist. And dare I say, as a kindred spirit.

On a somewhat related note, Dafoe has never won an Oscar. Which feels wrong, and wild. But he is the #1 Most Watched Actor on Letterbox. Which Flight tells us in his analysis means that “audiences love to watch him and filmmakers love to cast him.” Seems like a very high honor to me, to win over both the people you’re trying to entertain and the people making the art.

But if you just say it, ‘#1 Most Watched Actor on Letterbox’ it almost feels like a throw away accolade. A popcorn trophy. It certainly doesn’t carry the same prestige as an academy award. (Am I over-identifying with a sixty-nine-year old male celebrity? Shhh.)

Flight’s twenty-min video talks a lot about how Dafoe has a unique approach and background underpinning his acting. But for me the thesis of the video is a single revolutionary truth: Willem Dafoe doesn’t care about realism. 

It’s not that he can’t perform naturalism. Flight reminds us of his notable performance in The Floida Project where he blends seamlessly with a cast made up of mostly non-actors. For Dafoe, naturalism just isn’t that interesting.

“That’s the beauty of it,” Dafoe says, smiling (without veneers!) in an interview clip discussing his performance, “You’re constructing something other than reality.”

I am self-conscious that in hyping up my new found pal Willem Dafoe, I am showing you, gentle reader, messily and openly, a chip on my shoulder. But I can’t stop typing.

Maybe I’m being a persnickety creator when I say that Fan Service is a little bit hard to categorize: it’s got speculative elements (is this just a higher brow/more litfic way of saying there’s magic? I’m not trying to be pretentious. I genuinely can’t tell.) but it’s also firmly grounded in a contemporary world. 

I got asked about that choice a fair amount around the book’s release. And even if others weren’t saying it in this way, it’s hard not to hear the question and think about the fact that what’s hot in the romance novel market right now is either side of the naturalism spectrum.

On one end we have the boom of small town contemp. A subgenre that, in theory*, should be one of the most accessible and relatable to readers’ real lives. On the other end of the axis, we have “Romantasy” which abandons the world as we know it for one more fantastical, more escapist. 

Then there’s Fan Service—which takes place in a small town in Florida that is in all other ways true to life except, oh, wait one minute, it’s also got an actor who used to play a werewolf on tv who is now turning into one in real life and the only person who can help him is a former fangirl turned certified Hater—and it doesn’t fit. 

Why did I do this? Knowingly!

The answer is simple: the thing that most interests me about monster stories is what they can uniquely reveal to us about being human. 

When faced with critique about challenging naturalistic norms in his approach, Dafoe says, “I stand by that performance. There was no other way to do it.”

And you know what? I feel the same. 

HOUSEKEEPING

FAN SERVICE is out now!

Thanks so much to those of you who were able to join me either virtually or in person to celebrate release. Doing post-pub events is one of my favorite parts of the process.

ICYMI: SHAMELESS SERIES SPECIAL EDITIONS

Just ahead of the 5 year anniversary of THE ROOMMATE (literally how??), the team at Illumicrate/Afterlight is doing a special edition hard-cover set with beautiful new art work and sprayed edges. This a limited edition, meaning once this printing runs out they’re gone, and it’s on sale right now. 

You can order your set from: https://www.rosiedanan.com/signed-books

BONUS CONTENT: Looking for the (free! spicy!) extra scenes that take place between The Roommate and The Intimacy Experiment? Subscribers always have access through the chat.