Willem Dafoe (The Virtuoso) and Chaka Khan (The Voice) are Harper’s Bazaar’s 2024 Vanguard Idols

📸 BY THÉO DE GUELTZL

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a61787052/willem-dafoe-beetlejuice-2-icons-interview-2024/

Excerpt:

Dafoe’s nearly 45 years onscreen have been an extended exercise in pulling that off. As a young actor, he dropped out of college to join an experimental theater company in Milwaukee, which led him to another in New York, which led him to cofound his own troupe in SoHo, known as the Wooster Group. When he began his film career at the tail end of the 1970s, he says, “My identity was still that I was a downtown theater actor.” The perspective it gave him was freeing. “I was working with people who weren’t approaching theater or film necessarily from a career point of view. It wasn’t a business to them. It was something they did because it turned them on, it thrilled them,” he says. “To start working the way that I started, it was counter to something culturally embedded in me as an American man growing up in a particular time. There was a desire to strive, to make something of yourself, and that can be creatively constipating. But that drops away if you learn there are other ways to be.”

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a61817259/chaka-khan-icons-interview-2024/

Excerpt:

It’s no wonder Khan’s celebrating 50 years in the music industry and in 2023 celebrated a well-deserved (and long overdue) induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—although she would rather not look back and instead wants to forge forward. “I’m not nostalgic at all. I’m just busy with my life, and suddenly I’ve been doing it for 50 years,” she says. “I’m not counting. I’m just living every day like everybody else, so I’m surprised when birthdays come up. I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, tempus fugit,’ and I keep it moving.” Khan says, laughing. “I’m really a next person.”