Willem the Conqueror

Willem Dafoe is cool. Not the manufactured cool of the Brat Pack; not the bruisingly boozy cool of Sean Penn; not even the righteous cool of saintly Sergeant Elias, the character Dafoe played to perfection in Platoon. Dafoe's cool is the classic kind: a stem, scruffyheaded bohemianism true to life on-screen and off. This month he appears as a jaded military detective in Off Limits, a policier set in wartime Saigon, and he will soon take the ultimate star turn playing Jesus in Martin Scorsese's The Passion. Yet Dafoe remains true to his school: he is still an active member of the Wooster Group, the wildly controversial experimental New York theater collective directed by his real-life companion, Elizabeth LeCompte. Take away that performance-art background and you take away the thing that has made him the most believable misfit Hollywood's had in years. And the coolest.

CRAIG BROMBERG