For years, a rumor has floated around about the length of Willem Dafoe’s penis. Willem Dafoe’s penis is said to be extra-large. It is allegedly so big, in fact, that after filming nude scenes in the 2009 film Antichrist, Lars von Trier reported that he needed to re-shoot them using a different actor. “He has an enormous dick,” the director told The Boston Phoenix while promoting the film. “We had to take those scenes out of the film.” Here came the kicker: When Dafoe’s penis was on screen, said von Trier, “everybody got very confused when they saw it”.
What this means is that somewhere out there lives a humble man whose penis stood in for Willem Dafoe’s. Who is he?
I tracked him down. His name is Horst Stramka.
After some initial confusion about why I would want to write about this, Stramka called me and we had an amiable chat. Has anyone ever interviewed him about this before, I asked. No, he said. Stramka, who is now 63, is a German actor who has appeared in more than 1,000 porn films, where he is generally known as “Horst Baron.” Before porn he was a mechanic, renovated houses, worked in immigration security, and was involved in buying and selling on the stock exchange in Switzerland before realizing he was involved in some kind of pyramid scheme.
Antichrist came near the end of Stramka’s adult film career—he stopped working in porn in 2012. A German company got in touch with him to ask if he would be, as he put it, “all right to bring my penis in the scene.” Stramka, who had been doing porn for about 15 years, replied, “Come on, this is my job.” There doesn’t seem to have been an audition process, and Stramka found himself on the set of a very different kind of film altogether, paid 900 Euros a day for having considerably less sex than he would normally.
Stramka was only needed for two scenes, but told me he had to be on set for four days because von Trier takes a long time to shoot. “This is like a sickness,” Stramka said. He was told not to speak to the director. “With Charlotte [Gainsbourg] he was talking; with me, nothing.” He felt that the crew were fascinated by him: that they were thinking “How can he do this?”—both in a practical and an ethical sense.
Unlike Dafoe, Gainsbourg is fully naked onscreen at various points throughout the film. But, for a penetration scene and a handjob scene, Stramka stood in, as did a fellow porn actor called Mandy Mystery..
When he spoke to Dazed at the time, Dafoe seemed to contradict von Trier’s version of events. “Lars used a porn actor for those scenes,” he said. “It was a good decision because, if it was me, then that’s all that people would talk about. Obviously Lars wants the characters to have genitals but it would become a distraction: ‘Oh, they really had sex!’ If he had asked me to do it, I don’t know what I would have said.” Of course, no one would expect Dafoe and Gainsbourg to have actual sex onscreen, but notice that at no point did Dafoe say that he was filmed nude before being replaced by Stramka.
So why did Stramka need to replace Dafoe in the first place? Stramka told me that he spoke to Dafoe before the filming. “He’s a nice guy,” he said. “He’s normal. He’s not afraid to touch people. You can touch him.” According to Stramka, Dafoe said that he didn’t need a double and had done this kind of thing before. It was his management, however, who decided that because he was famous he should be drawing a line at full frontal nudity. Did Stramka ever get any impression that it was a size issue? “I’ve never seen him naked so I can say nothing to this,” he said. Dafoe never talked about the length of his penis to Stramka, which isunsurprising, really.
The only person who has ever claimed that Dafoe’s penis is confusingly long is von Trier. Unfortunately, when I reached out to his management for comment on this pressing enquiry, they didn’t respond. As for Dafoe—whom I didn’t want to disturb with this question as he’s made clear he’s sick of it— the one time he’s elaborated on his downstairs department, it was about a different film. In 2018, Dafoe claimed that when he was filming Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and needed to be naked for the crucifixion scene, his penis flopped out from between his legs, suddenly visible. With the stuntmen on set unwilling to tuck it back in, it fell to “a very sweet guy from the costume department” to do the job. The source of this story, however, seems to be a video that was a partnership with Funny Or Die —can we trust it entirely?
Notably, the video also contains confirmation that Stramka was Daofe’s penis double: Dafoe describes him as a big, chain-smoking, German man who said, “Hello, I’m Horst—I hope you like my size, I hope you like my style.” But the other thing the video reveals is a crucial, overlooked detail: Dafoe tells a story about stripping naked with von Trier and going swimming in icy water. Is it possible, therefore, that von Trier was basing his comments entirely on this glimpse? It may well be. And, given how cold it must have been, it makes Dafoe even more impressive.
Whether Lars von Trier’s account is true or not, it has cemented Dafoe’s reputation as Hollywood’s most well-hung man. No one has had their trouser department scrutinised as intensely. (If you want it, in fact, there is video evidence that at least explains where the rumors would have come from.)
As for Stramka, he wasn’t even invited to the Antichrist premiere. He now works as an actor in regular films. It was the first and last time he was ever anyone’s penis double. But, if you ever need one, you know who to call.
