05/08/2026
Love him❣️
After 40+ years living in New York, Willem Dafoe moved to a small farm outside Rome. He raises alpacas. He has 14 of them. He bottle-feeds the ones rejected by their mothers. He names every single one. His favorite is a male alpaca called Hermes 🦙
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The 70-year-old four-time Oscar nominee, the man who's played the Green Goblin and Christ and the Lighthouse keeper and a dozen other roles you can't forget, lives most of his life now between Rome and a small countryside property he bought with his wife, the Italian filmmaker Giada Colagrande
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"I lived in New York for over 40 years. I married an Italian. She didn't want to give up living in Rome, and I had no objections," he told Kelly and Ryan
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The farm has chickens, turkeys, sheep, goats, and the alpacas. He calls himself a "gentleman farmer" with full self-awareness that the title is half joke and half real. The animals get fed before he gets coffee. He handles the daily care himself, especially the alpacas. He's spoken in interviews about how each one has its own temperament and how he's had to learn to read them
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Mark Ruffalo visited once during the press tour for "Poor Things." The two of them got photographed standing next to a baby alpaca. The photo went mildly viral. Dafoe found it funny. The farm wasn't a backdrop. It just happened to be where he lived
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He still acts. He still takes the major roles. But he gives interviews now from a kitchen in the Italian countryside where you can hear chickens in the background. The alpacas don't watch his movies. They just want him to come back from set so he can feed them
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Hermes is doing fine 🦙
