All About Willem Dafoe's Son, Activist Jack Dafoe

The 'Poor Things' star shares son Jack with director Elizabeth LeCompte

Meet Willem Dafoe’s son, Jack Dafoe.

The Spider-Man star welcomed his only child Jack in 1982 with his former partner, director Elizabeth LeCompte. The pair began dating in 1977 after Willem joined the theater company, The Performance Group. They never married, but their relationship continued throughout Jack’s childhood. They split in 2004 after 27 years together.

LaCompte founded her own theater company, The Wooster Group, in the 1970s along with Willem and actor and novelist Spalding Gray. Soon after, Willem landed his first movie role and began his Hollywood career, traveling back and forth between Los Angeles and New York City, where he and LeCompte raised their son.

In 1987, Willem spoke to Bomb Magazine about raising a child as a working actor. “Jack, I’m with him a lot, he travels with us all the time,” he said. “It’s an interesting relationship. It’s interesting to bring a kid up around a bunch of adults who are essentially playing around with things. He has a very weird vision of what people do for a living.”

Here’s everything to know about Willem Dafoe’s son, Jack Dafoe.

He was born in 1982

Jack Frank Dafoe was born in June 1982 to parents Willem and LeCompte. He grew up mostly in New York and California, but spent a lot of time traveling with his parents and former nanny Dennis Dermody, who went on to work as a film critic at Paper Magazine for more than 30 years.

A 2007 profile of LeCompte in The New Yorker describes Jack going to the Philippines jungle at the age of 3 while his father filmed Platoon and traveling to Morocco two years later when Willem was shooting The Last Temptation of Christ.

His parents never married

Willem and LeCompte had a long-lasting relationship — they were together for more than 25 years — but the pair never married.

According to Willem, LeCompte wasn’t interested in being a traditional couple. They met when Willem was 22 and joined her theater company. “I fell in love with the woman and the group,” he told The New Yorker.

At the time, though, LeCompte was in a relationship with another member of the group, Spalding Gray. “It was complicated, because we were all working together,” Willem recalled in a 2018 interview with Esquire. “In fact, the three of us lived in the same loft, but we divided it in half.”

Remaining unmarried was another nontraditional aspect of their relationship. “She's the mother of my son, but we never married because to her marriage represented ownership, and I respected that,” Willem told The Guardian in 2009. “But after a while, I was more interested in getting married than she was.”

The actor continued, “Increasingly I found it's not so good going around saying, ‘I'm with this person but I'm not married to them.’ It's confusing, to you and other people. If you're traveling around a lot, you have to make a decision about whether you're going to be monogamous.”

The couple split in 2004 after Willem met his current wife, Giada Colagrande, whom he married in 2005.

His dad never gave him advice about dating

Willem told The Guardian that he refrained from giving Jack advice about dating and relationships growing up.

“I have a son who's in his 20s now. I've never given him advice about women — I think it would be too oppressive for his old man to give him that kind of advice,” he said. “He's got to find his own way; I can't help him. I teach by example. Although I've probably been a very bad example.”

He inspired his dad’s role in a video game

In 2013, Willem took on a new acting challenge with a starring role in the video game Beyond: Two Souls. Speaking to Metro that year, he explained how acting in a video game was a different experience than being in movies. “It was quite freeing because it was essential you used your imagination,” he told the outlet. “It’s scary but also freeing.”

He went on to say that his knowledge of video games in general came from his son’s childhood. “Most of my experiences came through my son, Jack,” he said. “He’s grown up now, but when he was smaller I remember him playing Sega Genesis with Sonic the Hedgehog.”

He went to Yale

After high school, Jack attended Yale University, where he wrote for the student newspaper, the Yale Daily News. He graduated in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in English language and literature.

Following his studies at Yale, Jack went on to receive a doctorate of law from the University of Michigan Law School.

He is an environmental activist

According to his LinkedIn page, Jack has dedicated his career to environmental causes.

He was a senior policy and research associate at the NYC Apollo Alliance, where he focused on promoting sustainable urban environments through clean energy solutions.

“Since I was very young, I was a huge, self-described environmentalist,” Jack said in a 2008 interview. “I saw the challenge of climate change was something that was very major to me and I was very excited to see this alliance come together.”

After getting his law degree in 2012, Jack went on to work as an environmental attorney. He now lives in Maine, where he is the Assistant Attorney General of the Natural Resources Division.

He has a family of his own

Although both of his parents are public figures in the entertainment and theater industries, Jack stays out of the spotlight. While he has attended several red carpet events with his father over the years, Willem rarely talks about his son in interviews. Jack also doesn’t use social media, so not much is known about his personal life.

However, what is known is that Jack is married and lives in Maine with a family of his own. He and his wife, Alejandra, a musician from Portland, have a son named Tom and a daughter named Ursula.

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