Film director Jennifer Peedom laughs as she recalls how quickly Richard Tognetti dismissed her first suggestion of narrator – Sean Connery – for their recent cinematic and musical collaboration, Mountain. The artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra was writing a score that, along with majestic works by the likes of Beethoven, Arvo Pärt and Vivaldi, would accompany Peedom's captivating vision of high-altitude vistas, with a script by British author Robert Macfarlane.

On second thought, Peedom realised their narrator couldn't be a token celebrity co-opted merely for press mileage. They had to be authentic, with a voice you could hear and picture on the mountains. A friend suggested Willem Dafoe. Perfect. With cheekbones as sharp as mountain spurs and craggy lines resembling ice crevices, Dafoe's striking visage looked like it had toiled. Experienced life. 

"As an artist he takes risks and we're making a film about risk-takers," says Peedom of a 70-minute documentary that features the extremities of climbing, skiing and wingsuit flying, along with majestic natural beauty. "I think he relates to that. He's a nature lover. I saw him in The Hunter [a 2011 film set in Tasmania] and had an immediate association with him in the outdoors. And he's willing to do experimental work."

Dafoe was indeed willing, despite having refused narration jobs in the past because he doesn't want to be "the go-to voice", à la Morgan Freeman. "The criteria's pretty much: why me? It's the same criteria for choosing any acting role," the 62-year-old American actor says. "Am I the guy to do this? Does it create a challenge for me and am I the best guy to do this? If anyone could do it, then it's not to do."

More often than not, he's the best guy if a director is after someone willing to push it to the edge. That said, Dafoe is not the ball of unbridled energy he so often portrays. He's smaller than anticipated, as most actors are, with a face that, while initially typecast for venom, can portray the highest mirth or melancholy, and is softer in person than on screen. The son of evangelical Christians and a devout yoga practitioner, in person Dafoe appears calm, open and seemingly content, with an agile mind.

He's been busy recently, to say the least. A handful of Dafoe's movie performances will screen during the second half of the year, including Mountain, which tours as an ACO national concert series in August before its September 21 cinema release. He's an early tip for a third Oscar nomination for the recent Cannes Film Festival favourite The Florida Project, and he'll be seen in Kenneth Branagh's all-star take on Murder on the Orient Express. 

There's also the sci-fi film What Happened to Monday?, Netflix horror movie Death Note and a turn as superhero good guy Nuidis Vulko in Justice League, a character who returns next year in Aquaman. All before he plays Vincent Van Gogh for Julian Schnabel.

That's an eclectic line-up by any standards, but Dafoe is also thumbing his nose at comic book convention. In a Hollywood now dominated by Marvel and DC Comics films, featuring in more than one superhero universe is not really done, even if the omnipresence of such films makes their slings, arrows and pay cheques increasingly alluring. Dafoe was in early and memorably, playing a maniacal Green Goblin in the first Spider-Man series of this century, 2002's Sam Raimi-directed iteration. Now he's jumping into DC's Justice League.

Dafoe smiles. He professes disinterest in his career beyond seeking balance. "I'm always seeking out commercial films to balance out my great love for smaller art films, because that creates a career health," he says. "It's fun because one world doesn't know about the other. It's like I'm married and I have a mistress and they don't know about each other, so I get the best of both worlds." He adds, laughing: "In theory." The actor's catholic choices make stereotypes moot, particularly the notion that he specialises in bad guys – a suggestion that "really tells me more about [that person's] taste in movies".

No, if there's one thing that unifies Dafoe's output it's that he's worked with many of modern cinema's greatest nutbags and polarising personalities, including Lars von Trier, Abel Ferrara, Oliver Stone and David Lynch. Often repeatedly. The directors that spook many define Dafoe's career as much as the kooky performances he's interspersed with critically acclaimed roles in the likes of Auto Focus, Shadow of the Vampire and Mississippi Burning. This rapport with cinema's unconventionals suggests Dafoe is not to be intimidated. He smiles, agreeing that his directors are often too much for others, "because they're too particular or too personal or too crazed".

That's perfect for Dafoe, though. "Someone like Lars or Abel or David Lynch, they need someone to do their bidding," he explains. "And to varying degrees there's also a collaboration where, by your willingness in being ready, in being flexible, you also participate in their thinking because you become part of their language."

Whatever it takes; all in service of the film. "The directors are the ones who want to express their experience of this world through their language, and I'm happy to be an element of that language," he says. "If you make it about you, it limits you. Of course it's about you but that can't be your intention."

He’s always watchable, albeit occasionally in unwatchable films.

And that conflicts with the Hollywood "star system", he adds. Dafoe skips between the commercial and the arthouse, the pervasive and the obscure. He breaks into laughter. "That's why sometimes I'm quite traumatised, because you can't reconcile the two! That's also the tension that keeps you from being susceptible to the whims of popularity and business and all that. You still retain your own independence because you've never bought in completely to being an employee. You're still your own person." He cracks a broad grin. "In theory."

Dafoe is an acting utilitarian – and my, how he's been used. Martin Scorsese cast him in The Last Temptation of Christ as a Jesus who, while on the cross, pined for sex with Mary Magdalene. Lynch made Dafoe a slimy gangster menacing Laura Dern in Wild at Heart, and Ferrara had him live Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's last dark days before his murder, in Pasolini. Dafoe has poured candle wax onto a naked Madonna in Body of Evidence, played an appalling T.S. Eliot pushing his wife to a mental institution in Tom & Viv, had his penis – or at least a stunt penis – nailed to a plank in Antichrist, and as Sgt Elias provided the decency amid the chaos and depravities of Stone's Vietnam War drama Platoon.  

The extremities of his performances and the visions of his directors have sometimes overwhelmed his acting achievements. The 2009 drama Antichrist was hijacked by the experimental nature of Von Trier's work and a desire to transgress with violence and sadomasochism, yet Dafoe's portrayal of a grieving father attempting to console his mentally unstable wife was deeply affecting.

What does he recognise about his own talents? "That I'm game!" he grins brightly. "That's all. No, that I want to be transformed and I like people. And I'm curious and I'm disciplined." Disciplined? "Terrifically." He questions whether he should admit to that, as it denotes a certain pride. "My point is, I think of myself as a worker and I love the satisfaction of doing a job for someone. I really think about applying myself in a way that surprises myself and uncovers some sort of mystery or some sort of truth." 

THE ONLY one of seven children not to follow their surgeon father into a white-collar profession, Dafoe studied drama in his home state, Wisconsin, before moving to New York. There, he became entranced with the work of an avant-garde theatre group and its creative whirlwind, Elizabeth LeCompte. They became partners and she took over the troupe, which became the acclaimed Wooster Group. (They separated in 2004; he married Giada Colagrande the following year.) His ascension from stage to screen was relatively quick, from being fired from 1980's Heaven's Gate to starring in To Live and Die in LA in 1985 before his first Oscar-nominated role, in 1986, for Platoon. His initial roles were largely violent. Now, he can play anyone and is always watchable, albeit occasionally in unwatchable films, on account of their violence, transgression or quality.

Mountain is more than watchable. "I wasn't trying to make a mainstream film here, it's a collaboration," director Peedom says. "I felt like Willem of all people would get it."

Dafoe craves such alliances. Australian director Daniel Nettheim recalls flying to New York to meet Dafoe to invite him to collaborate on the script for The Hunter, a 2011 film about a mercenary scientist trying to track down the last Tasmanian tiger. "What he looks for is diversity," Nettheim says. "He's partly interested in the role but he seems very interested in the director. He loves auteurs, people who have ownership of the script. Honestly, the more extreme the auteur, the more he enjoys the work."

Australian Chamber Orchestra artistic director Richard Tognetti, who wrote the score to the cinematic and musical collaboration Mountain, and director Jennifer Peedom, who cast Dafoe.

The role of the scientist was a neat fit for Dafoe the doer; it tickled his fancy that he was allowed to wander the wilds of Tasmania setting traps and skinning animals. Nettheim says Dafoe was perfect because the character was an outsider and Dafoe is "known to be a very disciplined, physical actor and he has an amazingly expressive and compelling face". More importantly, though, Nettheim adds, "I was thinking as an audience member. Who would I like to watch wandering around in the wilderness for two hours?"

The world premiere of Mountain, at the Sydney Opera House in June. Photo: Maria Boyadgis

Dafoe seems to like it in Australia. In 2001 he spent a month in Melbourne appearing in the Wooster Group's acclaimed production of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape. In 2008 he co-starred in the Spierig brothers' Queensland vampire film, Daybreakers. And he returned here mid-year, not only for the world premiere of Mountain at the Sydney Opera House (as part of the city's film festival), but also to film Aquaman on the Gold Coast for Australian blockbuster director James Wan. "He likes to work, he likes to travel, he likes to be useful," observes Peedom. 

When I ask Dafoe what he's learnt during all this work and travel, he resists – a little. He notes that an unexamined life is not worth living, yet constant measurement makes one self-conscious. Nevertheless, he's keen to discuss a feeling he often fails to describe adequately; what it is that makes him a clear-eyed worker rather than an impulsive animal. He suggests there's a notion in culture that actors, as creative artists, are storytellers.

"I kind of subscribe to the idea that stories hide the truth," he counters. "A good story is great but we're a little too obsessed with delegating things and just being stories, particularly in cinema, because the most beautiful things about cinema have nothing to do with story." He's not in the acting game to say what he thinks, or to explain himself. "I'm in it to apply myself to something that I don't know. Usually – and this is why I'm attracted to strong directors – I like to take what [they're] interested in doing and make it mine. That's always more liberating because you're not dealing with your impulses that ... for various reasons are the go-to place."

He's more comfortable when required to "get in the director's head, be their object, their creature". He adds, "I'm always looking for those situations where [it's] required of me to do something I don't know how to do and I have to find my way to do it. That becomes the creativity – not expressing what I think, not expressing what I know, but this process of going towards something that I don't know."

He and his collaborators might not get there, but the movement becomes the substance. "As an artist, I'm always like a vampire. I'm doing your bidding and that's greatly liberating and that's where you find the best impulses, beyond experience, intuitive. It taps you into what connects us all. So then you're making things that people are receptive to and they understand it. It's not culturally bound, it's not about me, it's about us all." He leans back, and the frown lines by his mouth deepen in a smile. "How did I do? I get a little closer each time I do it."