Willem Dafoe to play Vincent Van Gogh in new movie

Willem Dafoe has become the latest actor to tackle artist Vincent Van Gogh on the big screen.

The one-time Spider-Man villain is growing a beard to portray the painter in artist and director Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate, which will shoot in France later this year (17).

"It is not a biopic but I play Vincent Van Gogh," Dafoe tells WENN. "I've already started my research.

"It's a very beautiful script, which concentrates on the last part of Van Gogh's life, which is the most dramatic but also the most productive."

Dafoe and Schnabel will be shooting the film on the site of The Yellow House in Arles, which featured in an 1888 oil painting by Van Gogh, and the actor had some fascinating research to source the character.

"Recently there's been a discovery of a whole ledger filled with sketches that have been authenticated, that had the famous portrait of Madame Ginoux of Arles; she gave him (Van Gogh) a ledger and he put, like, 80 drawings in it," Dafoe shares.

"He gave it back to someone at the hotel and it looked like a ledger and so they put it with all their ledgers, so it was lost for many years. It's a period where he was really in top form and created beautiful sketches.

"There's a book by a French publisher (with the sketches) that's just come out."

Van Gogh rented out four rooms in the Place Lamartine house in Arles in the late 1880s. The building was badly damaged in a bombing raid during World War Two and later demolished.

Dafoe isn't the first actor to portray Van Gogh onscreen - the painter has also been played by Kirk Douglas, Tim Roth, Jacques Dutronc, and Benedict Cumberbatch.