Willem Dafoe remembers NSFW anecdote from early career

Willem Dafoe has a rich background in experimental theatres. But sometimes those experiments turned into something very else.

One such moment, the Spider-Man star recalled in an interview with Smartless, where his early career shenanigan act was mistaken as paid sex work.

Remembering the times, the 68-year-old revealed to be part of The Wooster Group in downtown Manhattan.

Adding his director and former partner, Elizabeth LeCompte was stricken with grief after her father's passing.

Witnessing this, the group "needed to do something light and easy." So, they came up with an avant-garde hula piece.

The troupe did a dance piece as they "took an old Hawaiian record from the '50s — really corny, y'know, Hawaiian music — and we got some grass skirts and some leis, and someone painted a backdrop, and we invented these dances, we just made them up, and we'd do the dances to this music, you know?"

He continued, "The gag was, to make it stick, under our grass skirts, we weren't wearing anything, so it was two men and a woman, and she was also not wearing anything, and bare-breasted."

"So we did this show, it was very popular, it was a little chamber piece, but very popular."

After receiving roaring applause for their performance, the stage actors were invited to a private party to act out the single for a hefty sum.

"They offered us, like, I can't remember, like a thousand bucks apiece, and at that time, we were all really poor, [so] that was like 'wow! Yeah, we can do that.' So we went to this party, y'know… we got dressed in the toilet, and then we came out without the set, only with the music, and with our non-costumes, and we did this dance."

Host Jason Bateman instantly got the hang of the salacious anecdote—joked, "[And] they started throwing singles at you," pointing out that party members believed them to be strippers. 

The Academy-nominated star nodded in affirmative, "Yeah!." 

"And at the end, people started coming up and saying, 'okay, let's go! Come with me!'" suggesting that guests thought Willem would give them a private, intimate session.

"They thought we were, like, a strippergram and then some," he concluded.