He is preparing for a chamber opera called Giacomo Variations, which will put Mozart's music to Casanova's vast 4,000-page memoir to tell the story of his final years, and it will see Malkovich in period costume as the ageing Lothario. Demand for Malkovich from Hollywood studios continues unabated – a Disney film about race horsing, Secretariat, was released last month and Steven Spielberg's action franchise, Transformers 3, is scheduled for cinemas this summer.īut these days, Malkovich appears to be producing most of his cutting-edge work on stage, which is where he began his career in 1976. John Malkovich has worked consistently since the mid-1970s, having directed and starred in over 70 movies and produced a clutch of others, including the indie successes, Juno and Ghost World. That mistaken belief, snaps Malkovich, is what leads "so many guys play them so badly." It's the job of the public, the courts and the parole system to make judgements."Įarlier in the week, Keanu Reeves – also at the festival – had suggested that the job of the film villain was generally easier to play, less nuanced. I don't feel sorry for Jack Unterweger, I feel sorry for the girls he killed, but that doesn't prevent me from living it. "A lot of bad guys think the same as good guys. He is currently touring in a stage production of The Infernal Comedy, playing Jack Unterweger, the Austrian serial killer who was convicted of murder in the Seventies but released to kill again, after becoming a cause célèbre among intellectuals who saw him as a fine example of rehabilitation. Yet the technical, and moral, complexities of playing "baddies" should not be underestimated. "But it's what I'm asked to do, and what people like me to be." Assuming the identities of difficult men with dark secrets can be exhausting, he says. The character he has most related to, he says, is Lennie, the unassuming, accidentally-murderous gentle giant he played in the 1992 adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Or the cute family comedy, The Great Buck Howard, in which he plays a 1970s' television psychic. "That's a lot more like me," he confides. It was based on a true story about a Japanese commuter who had become so worried about tsunamis that he invented rubber underpants which inflated if hit by a wave. He is more at home making out-of-genre work like Strap Hanging, the short film he made in 1999 with the fashion designer, Bella Freud. Ironically, the bad-guy roles are not the parts in which he would cast himself, he says. The worst few have been blighted by cartoonish over-acting. The best of these performances, many of which are supporting roles, have been so compelling that they have eclipsed leading actors. Malkovich's ability to embody an Iago-esque evil intelligence has seen him cast as clever criminals and psychopaths ever since. (Annie Lennox was so impressed that she called on him to appear as the wigged Vicomte in her video for "Walking On Broken Glass".) His burgeoning film career in the 1980s was cemented by his breakthrough performance in Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons, in which he appeared, arch and overdressed in powdered wig and frills, as the perversely seductive Vicomte de Valmont. The film, with its blend of dark comedy and existential angst, earnt Malkovich enormous indie-film kudos and a cult following. The latter featured ticket-buyers who paid to climb into the actor's mind through a portal, before being spewed out of a sluice gate after 15 minutes to land in a ditch off the New Jersey turnpike. There have been few notable romantic leads for Malkovich – Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky, is one – and equally few comic turns – he has hosted Saturday Night Live, and appeared as himself in Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich. Close-up, he appears leaner, fox-like, with an intense, unmellowed quality that has led him to colonise the role of the "charismatic fiend" in Hollywood. The day before we meet, Malkovich had appeared at the opening ceremony of the Marrakech Film Festival, walking across the stage with a heavy-hipped gravitas.
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