#’It’s Always A Little Difficult When You Die In A Movie’

Thanks to the multiverse, all things are possible, so Dafoe did get a chance to return as Osborn, and now, he’s part of the fourth highest-grossing movie of all time.

This should probably have been a no-brainer, but I did not even realize they had digitally de-aged Dafoe for “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” The effects weren’t noticeable to me and I thought he slid right back into the role effortlessly. I was never a fan of what they did with any of the Goblin costumes in any of the Spider-Man movies, but “No Way Home” gave me a new appreciation for what Dafoe can do when it’s just his wild-eyed face, grinning evilly as Norman, tapping into some of that “Shadow of the Vampire” energy.

In another life, we might have seen Dafoe wearing a more comics-accurate Goblin mask. For “Spider-Man,” the studio Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc. (ADI) did some early tests with an animatronic make-up hybrid, which you can see in the video above.

Imagine Dafoe’s voice coming out of that thing. As it is, ADI’s mask was abandoned and Dafoe was ultimately saddled with a less-than-stellar costume design. Still, he gave it his all, and in “No Way Home,” that’s enough to make him sort of the alpha villain.

It’s no wonder he got the call from Marvel to mount his glider again, two decades later. That Willem Dafoe … methinks he’s really going places.