ON SECOND THOUGHT
John Malkovich on Being John Malkovich: “I Don’t Consider Myself”
Shortly after Dangerous Liaisons solidified him as one of our most unusual movie stars, John Malkovich appeared on this magazine’s March 1989 cover, where his friend Becky Johnston questioned him about his Chicago stage beginnings, life in the public eye, and the ambiguity of being alive. Now, as he gets set to star in the Apple TV period drama The New Look, the 70-year-old actor looks back on that time with the self-assuredness of someone who has it all figured out—almost.
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“I still have a lot of female friends, yeah.”
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“I’m surprised that I said they were assholes, not including myself. Normally, I certainly would’ve included myself.”
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“It’s more true of theater than film because you have a lot more control over what you do, oddly enough. In theory, that should not be the case, because one is living and ephemeral, and with the other, every single second is deliberated, over-manipulated, chosen, and not living. I think that was a pretty fair assessment at the time. Would I amend that? Not wildly.”
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“That was impossible for me to understand in my youth. I think people had an inkling that when True West went to New York, that would be the death of something we’d worked very hard to create, which was this particular group of people doing theater every day together. They were, in a way, justified, because it was never thus afterwards.”
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“That was very likely my Chicago production of Christopher Hampton’s Savages, which was voted the century’s worst production. It was a kind of an appalling train crash, plane crash, sinking-boat of a production of quite an interesting play. I don’t think I’ll try it again, let’s put it that way.”
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“It’s funny, I told Gary, who would always come in and give notes, ‘I’m lost. I don’t know what to do.’ He understood things on a different level than I did. We often argued about this or that, but the majority of the time Gary was right. I remember he went in to take over for a few days, and I tried to stay away and not bother him. On the third or fourth night, I came in and he was leaning against the wall as you entered that little theater we had. He had his head down. I whispered, ‘Are you okay?’ He said, ‘It’s just so bad.’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’”
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“I would say it’s something that happens to you. It’s not something you can make up. This is a fairly recent realization, but in my fifties I began to think of theater in terms of surfing, meaning you paddle out on your board, turn your back to the sun, and wait for the wave. What is the wave? Actors have a tendency to think of themselves as the wave or the creators of the wave, but after a lifetime of not only being onstage, but sitting in an audience, I realized that it has nothing to do with us until it’s created. The wave is the collision between the material and the public. We just ride it.”
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“That’s pretty fair. They were evangelical atheists, at least my father was. They didn’t much go for altered states. Other than that, all bets were off. When I came home from college or even from the very early years of Steppenwolf, there would still be a bunch of kids there—my age, younger, older, whatever—just hanging around with my parents.”
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“I have not been an avid reader for at least the last 10 years. Much of the internet ruined that as it ruined everything else, more or less.”
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“I don’t think my perceptions have changed drastically. People say, ‘Do you consider yourself this way or that way?’ Here’s the thing: I don’t consider myself. I’m like, ‘Did I get the distilled water? I have to do some ironing. I have to learn my lines. I have dance choreography in a couple of hours. I have to fill out an insurance claim for the rental car; apparently, there’s a scratch.’ I’m not someone who thinks about this person called John Malkovich. That’s of no interest to me.”
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“People are very nice in my experience. Generally, if they have negative feelings about you, that’s mostly saved for the internet.”
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“I don’t really read them—and it’s really not a negative thing about critics, because Steppenwolf only survived because of the critics. It never would’ve made it the first summer without Richard Christiansen and Michael VerMeulen and Lenny Kleinfeld and on and on—I don’t have any animosity at all. Their job is to inform the public and my job is to do plays for the public.”
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“I don’t know that I ever got to feel whatever it was that I was supposed to be a part of in L.A. I’m probably not an ideal subject to live in the company town, at least when it was the company town. I bought a house there in 1990, was almost never there, rented it out and let a lot of people stay there, and sold it in ’98 probably never having spent even 12 months there. I remember walking up by Sunset once, and thinking how tired it looked. It looked really exhausted. Maybe that’s not accurate, but that’s how it felt to me.”
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“Even more so now. I don’t feel compelled by most people. I was always more into books.”
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“I think that’s pretty accurate. How does one reconcile saying, ‘I want to do this very well, but it doesn’t matter?’ As Beckett said, ‘You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.’ But then, people love their work and they love their children and they love their spouse or they love clouds. That’s one of life’s complications. It’s a wonderful world, at least for some, or the possibility to be a wonderful world for many—certainly not everyone, because 3-year-olds get leukemia. It’s something I think that can’t be resolved, really, that you want to do something very well, but what difference will it make? I don’t know.”
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Grooming: Liz Washer at Artists With Agency.
Photography Assistant: Iain Emaline.
