About

Willem Dafoe Smoking Cigarette With Two Oranges One of Them Moldy refers to a viral photograph of actor Willem Dafoe smoking a cigarette and holding two oranges in his hands, with one of the oranges covered in mold. The image received its overly descriptive name from a viral post by a gimmick Twitter account in October 2021 and inspired redraws in December 2021.

Origin

On June 2nd, 2021, artist Alvaro Urbano posted a photograph of Willem Dafoe smoking a cigarette and two oranges, one of them moldy, to Instagram.^[1] According to the description of the photograph provided by Urbano, the oranges and the cigarette were a part of his installation for the thriller film Inside, which stars Dafoe as a thief attempting to steal valuable works of art. The oranges are props made from reinforced concrete.^[6] The post received over 1,300 likes on Instagram in seven months (seen below).

Dafoe holding in his hands (and lips) part of my installation for the thriller “Inside” directed by Vasilis Katsoupis and written by Ben Hopkins. In this experimental film a thief played by Willem Dafoe goes on the hunt for valuable works of art in a digitally upgraded collector's penthouse in Manhattan.

Spread

The image initially inspired memes on the Russian social media website VK. On June 9th, 2021, VK^[2] Fallout meme page eNCiaR | Fallout posted the earliest found edit of the image, a Fallout: New Vegas meme that gained over 1,200 reactions and 120 shares in roughly seven months (shown below, left). On September 6th, 2021, an edit imagining Dafoe as a retail worker at a Russian was posted on VK^[3] meme page GC. TEHCNOLOGIES (shown below, right).

On October 7th, 2021, Twitter^[4] gimmick account @reactjpg archived the image, providing a detailed description of it in order to ensure that it could be found in a search engine (shown below). The tweet received over 2,300 retweets and 13,900 likes in three months, with screenshots of the post going viral due to how humorously extensive the provided description turned out to be.

In late December 2021, following the release of the superhero film Spider-man: No Way Home that starred Dafoe and a viral repost by the Twitter gimmick account Pics That Go Hard, the image achieved virality as a redraw format. For example, on December 21st, 2021, Twitter^[5] user @ApexArtsIG posted a redraw of Dafoe as his character Green Goblin, with the image gaining over 250 retweets and 1,800 likes in two weeks (shown below).

The redraw format maintained prominence online in early January 2022, with multiple viral examples posted on Twitter.

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References