John Malkovich interviewed by Paul Flynn for Perfect Issue 8.
“To young performers, I kind of always say, it’s not all going to be adulation and tropical drinks on the veranda. And it’s not ever a warning; it’s really just a fact.”
In August 2017, a poster for the peerless American actor John Malkovich appeared on the side of a grand, stately concert hall in the Armenian capital, Yerevan. One of the surface quirks or valid depths of Malkovich’s professional life is his taste for and commitment to Eastern European theatre. Last autumn, he directed George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man in Sofia, Bulgaria, a production which sparked audience riots. ‘The absurdity of that,’ he says, ‘is really only matched by the passion of the feelings it ignited, for reasons that remain completely obscured to me.’ The previous summer, he directed a Latvian revival of Leopoldstadt, a play about the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire. During his stay in Riga, his latest film project was secured.
As an actor, John Malkovich’s primary skill – on film, in the theatre, whenever he adopts the behaviour of a character other than himself – is to locate truth, then to translate that truth without fear, whatever the consequences, however queasy. ‘That’s very kind,’ he says, only registering the slightest eyebrow movement upwards at the word ‘queasy’. His performances even at their most understated are always dazzling, but the truth is not always a comfortable spot to sit in. As a man, he understands this. He can unsettle with a smile.
‘As to if it’s accurate,’ he says of his actorly mission, ‘I don’t know what I do or don’t deliver. I suppose that depends on the viewer. But that is what I look for, yes, absolutely. When the material is good, there will hopefully be some kind of truth revealed. Something about the way humans behave, alone and with others. That’s all I try to do.’
We are talking the day after Boxing Day, 27 December, 2024, over Zoom. Malkovich is in the house he and his wife rent just outside Boston. He sits against a blank wall, wearing a chunky Aran sweater in what looks like one of Margaret Howell’s favourite earth tones. He’s warmer than expected, with a voice that cuts through the atmosphere at muted but purposeful angles. Because there is a clear and transparent reason for every piece of work Malkovich accepts, it takes no more than five minutes’ rudimentary introduction before getting to grapple with the tough stuff surrounding the new film. Opus is an interesting, if extremely queasy, examination of the purpose and consequence of modern fame.
He is a brilliantly engaging and occasionally very difficult conversationalist, who requires a little untangling, despite his transparency. Which is exactly what you want with John Malkovich. For me, as an actor he is among the all-time greats. I caught him first at the right age (I was 16) in the right film (Dangerous Liaisons) to witness something the like of which I’d never seen on screen before. ‘That’s very kind, thank you,’ he says, a forgiveness of sorts for my wobbling through a first couple of questions. Like all interested in the truth, there is genuine kindness to the man, even if the path to finding it is tricky.
In Yerevan, Malkovich was to perform extracts from the Argentinian novelist Ernesto Sabato’s feted work On Heroes and Tombs, while the Armenian State Youth Orchestra performed the compositions of esteemed Russian maestro Alfred Schnittke. The subject matter of the performance was the worship of false gods, a topic on which Malkovich is particularly well-versed, and once again revived in Opus.
He says he is not interested in his own fame, at all. ‘Because I am pretty much removed from that, that thing and that way of life.’ This despite the fact that he leant both his name and talent to Spike Jonze’s turn-of-the-millennium masterpiece, Being John Malkovich, a picture that encapsulated some of the fundamental complexity around the end of the last millennium and which intimates that our obsession with famous people will become so obtuse and troubled that at one point we will end up living in their minds. A proposition not quite borne out by the arrival of social media several years later, but close enough to make Being John Malkovich and its famous name a kind of soothsaying apostle on the future interface between fame and the modern man. ‘It was a very prescient film in that sense,’ he says. ‘But I stay away from all that.’
Did he know to? ‘No, I just think it’s not wise, it’s not helpful. I’ve done a million things, bits of press, but it’s important to maintain and retain yourself and your mysteries, as much as you can, without being incommunicative or cold.’
If someone asks a question courteously, it’s nice to answer courteously? ‘Absolutely.’
But that doesn’t mean you have to keep giving new information away about yourself? ‘Yeah, that’s a bad idea. Because people don’t know you, no matter what you say. Or in spite of what you say. Or because of what you say. You know someone after a pretty long period of time, I would say.’
On the subject of what a life in the spotlight can do to someone, the tricks it can play on them, Malkovich is fascinating. ‘I was never very involved in my…’ He pauses. ‘Kind of exaltation or examination. It’s just not a huge subject of interest for me.’ As to his own childhood heroes? ‘When I was young, of course there were people I admired, or thought were super-talented or funny or attractive or bright or worthwhile. But I never was really drawn to hero worship.’
He cites a story of being backstage at the Greek Theatre in LA, when someone slipped by and noticed Malkovich waiting for a writer friend who had gone to his dressing room to congratulate Bob Dylan after a show. ‘Of course, I’ve always admired so much of his work, greatly, as have many, many other people. I was standing there; someone said, “Oh, you’re so-and-so, you have to come back and meet Bob, he’s a fan,” or some such. That just seemed so absurd to me.’
They asked if he’d like to go and say hello, too. ‘I just said I absolutely wouldn’t do that. He has how many people that come backstage? Fifty? A hundred? I just wouldn’t want to bother him. I’m fine knowing or limiting what I know about him to his work, which I admire greatly.’ In Malkovich’s head, the work has to be enough. ‘If it happened in a more private setting then I’m sure that would be fascinating and interesting,’ he continues. Because of Opus, he has been thinking about the unassailable pop greats, the Bowies, Leonard Cohens, Dylans. ‘I have met some of the super-famous people,’ he continues, ‘including Bowie, who I went out with several times and who I really liked, who was actually just a lovely man.’ He parses the sentence as if that fact might be somewhat disappointing to anyone expecting a modern god to levitate into the room. He looks straight ahead, as if this is common knowledge to all. I nod back. ‘I felt the same about Mick Jagger, who I’ve seen socially a few times. So it doesn’t mean I don’t like them. I have liked them, a great deal. But to flatter yourself into a kind of hero-worship mode would… well, I’d find that very alarming.’
The piece he performed in Armenia was called ‘Report on the Blind’, a chapter from On Heroes and Tombs. ‘It’s a great book,’ he says now, ‘in which one of the narrators believes the blind rule the world.’ What if we could not see the heroes we worship? It’s an interesting, liberating treatise, one that Malkovich warmed to while studying for his masterful performance (really, look out the YouTube clips that still remain of it; he is at his most propulsive and volcanic on the Armenian stage). It suggests the exact opposite of pin-ups, the theme of this issue.
‘He’s quite a complicated character who is a bit of a sociopath,’ Malkovich continues, explaining the narrator. ‘He’s also spectacularly lazy, quite funny.’ He delivers both adjectives as compliments. ‘He was the head of an anarchist group, if an anarchist group can exist at this point of time.’ All worthy of exploring for their truth. ‘He’s a criminal, for all intents and purposes.’ Even better! ‘And he says about the existence of God… Number one: God does not exist. Number two: God exists and is a bastard. Number three: God exists but falls asleep from time to time; his nightmares are our existence.’ This idea appealed to Malkovich. ‘I think that’s kind of fitting for celebrity worship.’ Boom.
In Opus, Malkovich plays Alfred Moretti, the (fictitious) greatest pop star of all time. The pop star invites selected media to his cultish ranch in the middle of America to hear his first new music in over 30 years. A kind of living hell, which certainly fits with Sabato’s ideas of God, seeps onto the screen as the media arrive and attempt to settle in among the life of a modern god. It’s a disquieting movie. The nature of fame is torn to shreds. The evolution of false gods, the building of pulpits to shout from, all decimated. ‘It’s about the dangers of Neverland,’ says Malkovich.
He took the job because he liked the first-time writer/director, Mark Anthony Green, who first came out to Malkovich’s house in Boston to talk him through the project, then followed it up with a visit to Latvia when financing had been secured for it, to persuade him into playing Moretti. Green landed the Chic Organization’s Nile Rodgers and Beyoncé’s closest right-hand producer, Future, to turn out original music for Malkovich to sing in it. Malkovich delivers a peculiar but attractive suite of robo-disco jams for the soundtrack with careful, reedy restraint. The songs reminded me a bit of the time David Byrne enjoyed his brief rave interlude, recording with X-Press 2. If Malkovich is going to give his time over for film, he wants it to be interesting.
‘He came to me,’ he says, recalling the director’s visit. ‘He told me about what he wanted to do with it. I’m not sure I felt I was right for it, initially. But I really liked Mark Anthony and I work a lot with first-time directors.’ He points out that Being John Malkovich was both Spike Jonze’s and the audacious screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s first feature projects too. ‘Maybe I’ve done some things that didn’t necessarily work, but I don’t think it was ever because they were first time directors. It’s just very hard to make a movie that works. Most people get waylaid en route. I could tell he was very passionate about it. I could tell he had an idea about exactly what he wanted to do. I think it’s very unique.’
Of all his contemporaries, Malkovich has always been something of the odd one out. While his claims not to be interested in his public portfolio ring entirely sincere, a brand has stealthily built around him. That he became famous at all feels like an act of approbation against fame itself. He’s either too clever, too bald, too beautiful or too true for the cruel metrics of popularity. Yet there he always is. During the mid-Nineties, when he warranted the commercial as well as artistic weight for Miuccia Prada to cast him as a poster boy for her menswear campaigns and he made the evergreen Jerry Bruckheimer action flick Con Air, Malkovich still retained the alternative mystery of a dark guest at a very glamorous party, the one added to the invite list just to spice things up a little. He never quite fitted in. Like Steve Buscemi or Willem Dafoe, you would never cast John Malkovich as an everyman.
When aspiring actors approach him for advice, he will always tell them the same thing. ‘To young performers, I kind of always say, it’s not all going to be adulation and tropical drinks on the veranda.’ His rationale might be the most unusual thing to find in show business, a world he still circumnavigates the edges of. ‘It just isn’t like that. I’m not sure people ever hear that. And it’s not ever a warning; it’s really just a fact.’
Malkovich says that the natural inversion of being loved is to be hated. It’s a lesson all the greats learn young. ‘I’ve always felt that celebrities and people who want to be celebrities, they believe that you reach this certain plateau and everybody loves you. And in fact… well, any celebrity is at least equally hated as loved.’ He smiles, as if to prove the point. ‘At least.’ This, he thinks, is perfectly fair. ‘It’s understandable, and makes as much or as little sense as being idolised. Because you are talking about people who don’t know you. So I’ve always felt it’s very little to do with me.’ You have no real control over it. ‘Nor should you want control over it.’
Malkovich was schooled on the stage. He joined the nascent and wildly influential Chicago theatre company Steppenwolf while he was still at college in Illinois in the mid-Seventies. Not only did he get to perform the work of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller while both authors were still alive, he got to meet them too. Williams he met backstage after Malkovich had played Mitch, the blighted Gentleman Caller in A Streetcar Named Desire. Miller he went on to become friends with, travelling out to Connecticut to spend time with the playwright’s family.
These meetings established Malkovich and the Steppenwolf players as passers of a baton from the last great American stage work to a new generation, conduits to the magic of the written word. ‘Well, I hope so,’ he says. ‘Just to the extent that at my age – I was 71 a couple of weeks ago – I got to work with people like Arthur. I hope I don’t mess up the hand-off of the baton. Because that is of course always a danger. But that’s really a privilege. One of the great privileges of this occupation.’
Surely these men once inspired a kind of hero worship in the young actor? ‘Sure, yeah,’ he concedes. ‘It was a big thing for me. When my mother came to see me in the opening of Death of a Salesman that I did many years ago with Dustin Hoffman, we left and Dustin kind of ran over to say hello. She said to Dustin, “I just loved you in Tootsie,” and Dustin was like, “Well, what about this?” And she said, “Well, this is good too.” But who she wanted to meet was Arthur Miller. Like Tennessee Williams, for an American of my generation, these were two people who were greatly admired for a catholicity of reasons. And I knew Arthur very well. A very formidable human being, I would say.’
Malkovich fell into film as if by accident. After his direction of the Steppenwolf production of Lanford Wilson’s little-performed Balm in Gilead transferred to a fashionable East Village café theatre off-off-Broadway, Hollywood came knocking. ‘While I was doing that play I got a call, from Mark Rosenberg, who ran Warner Brothers,’ he explains, ‘who said he was Mark Rosenberg and he ran Warner Brothers.’ Sometimes, Malkovich’s dryness is just too perfect. Hollywood wasn’t a world Malkovich had anticipated entering. But his talent was too discernible, his gift for parlaying truth, his connection to the greatest traditions of American storytelling all too noticeable for it not to happen.
Rosenberg offered him a production deal, which he duly took advantage of by producing a film of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist for William Hurt (he calls him Bill, twice, which sends a little shiver up my spine). It never occurred to Malkovich that Rosenberg expected him to develop projects for himself to star in. ‘I didn’t have a plan,’ he explains, ‘I didn’t dream of what people might call “Big Things”. I dreamt of doing something well and continuing to try and do that with every opportunity I got.’
What he wanted most was ‘to learn from people’, which sounds like a lovely, tender aim when he says it out loud, and might just be the goal of all the greats when you break it down. It further explains his love for working with new talent and in territories most stars don’t touch. ‘It wasn’t just Williams and Miller and Lanford Wilson, who I also consider a great American playwright,’ he says. ‘It was Manoel de Oliveira, Raoul Luiz, the Coen brothers, Spielberg, Antonioni, Mastroianni, Bertolucci. All kinds of wonderful, fascinating, unique people. All those experiences, I hope, mark you. If they don’t, you’re not paying attention, I think.’ Then a pause. ‘Paul Newman, of course. Who I loved.’
Newman’s direction of Malkovich in The Glass Menagerie, playing Tom Wingfield, the poet who must leave his oppressive life and crippled sister behind to live his own truth, is a part that most understand now as Williams writing himself in disguise. Malkovich’s take is an apogee of screen acting. His ‘Blow out the candles, Laura’ monologue has never been matched. Tom Wingfield is a character who holds truths you will never find anywhere else as a gay teenager.
‘I concur,’ says Malkovich, who accidentally cultivated a devoted gay audience long before it was fashionable or even expected to do so. ‘I thought that was the most important element in the whole play, that he was gay, which I had never seen done and which struck me as spectacularly odd, though understandable as the play was first performed in 1944. But that’s a fantastically subtextual play, Williams’ best, about loss and the inability to express the agony of living insincerely. That, I think, is a beautiful, beautiful play. For that quality.’
Malkovich moved from Chicago to New York in the Eighties. The city was negotiating the death of disco, the peak of Downtown, the pre-eminence of Wall Street. Art was at the startling beginning of its commodification and net-worth, FTSE-index era. His first apartment, a Greenwich village walk-up, was recommended to him by Don Johnson and his ex-partner, the Warhol muse Patti D’Arbanville. ‘The only time I saw Warhol, I don’t think he knew who I was,’ he laughs.
Even the most famous cataloguer of fame passed Malkovich by. They were in the Korean market on the corner of Third Avenue and 64th street. ‘This is probably around midnight, 1am, it wasn’t early. I would’ve had a show, I don’t remember which one, and stopped at the market on my way home for some reason. Later, actually, I did a photographic project where I played Warhol, Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and Lady Warhol, all three. I didn’t know him at all. But he was my early New York.’ The photography project Malkovich refers to, which showed at Chicago’s Catherine Edelman Gallery in November 2014, was probably Malkovich’s closest brush of the hem of the world of the pin-up.
“Any celebrity is at least equally hated as loved. It’s understandable, and makes as much or as little sense as being idolised. Because you are talking about people who don’t know you. So I’ve always felt it’s very little to do with me”
In Opus, Mark Anthony Green selects an image of Malkovich’s 1989 cover of Interview magazine to highlight Alfred Moretti’s former fame, a disquieting mix of subject and object, a frame in which the separation between actor and character blurs, then dissipates. Malkovich’s cover coincided with his fame peak, after that incredible performance as Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, a film which precursors most of the brilliant career of Sofia Coppola. I mention to Malkovich that the film was on British TV over Christmas, suggesting it may be his most repeated. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he says, without a care. ‘Con Air, maybe, based on what people tell me? Maybe In the Line of Fire. You know, I loved Stephen.’
He means Frears, director of Dangerous Liaisons, an underrated director (‘I agree’) and highly self-effacing man (‘absolutely). “There was an evening for him,’ he says, ‘in I think November last year that they asked me to MC. I would’ve loved to, but I was directing the play in Sofia, so I was busy with my riots.’ Even on Zoom, these moments of tenderness carry their own gorgeous undercurrent, as if the steely, unnerving enigma of Malkovich, the man who went searching for truth, has softened with the decades. Part of staying away from the pursuit of fame, of being the man he is, is a kind of survival technique of its own. ‘I love Stephen,’ he says, ‘he is fantastic.’
I ask John Malkovich if the face he presents on stage and screen is wisdom because he is a wise man or, perhaps, because he likes reading wisdom. Does he intuit it when he finds it?
‘Yeah, I would say it’s the latter,’ he says. ‘Probably as a child there were things I intuited natively. Things I probably understood about people and, to an extent – big phrase – the human condition.”
His grand project, that microscopic search for the truth, was only ever about existing in a moment, not chasing some strange dream like fame, making John Malkovich a perfectly incandescent anti pin-ups’ pin-up.
‘The thing that helped me more than anything,’ he says, ‘was the ability to be where I am. A lot of people are so busy trying to get somewhere else or leave where they are or forget where they came from that it’s hard to be where you are. I think good stage actors, they have to be where they are. That serves you on stage. I think it serves you in life, too.’
John Malkovich interviewed for Perfect Issue 8 by Paul Flynn.
Photographer Yasmin Deba, Stylist Daniel Gaines.