John Malkovich has an affectionate habit of warning Nicoletta Peyran, his partner of more than three decades, about the various dangers that might befall her.
“I like to send my wife texts of disastrous things that could happen to her if she doesn’t listen,” Malkovich says over Zoom from a hotel in Boston, near his home outside the city. Folded into a couch, occasionally running a hand over his bald head, he speaks slowly, his familiar voice carrying an undercurrent of dry amusement. “This morning’s was a man being attacked by an octopus. He couldn’t get the octopus off his face.”
At 72, after well over 100 film and TV roles alongside an acclaimed stage career, the actor is at a point when it’s natural to contemplate how things might end. He has already outlived his father and three of his siblings, all of whom died in their 50s, and has lost many friends and colleagues as well.
“Death is very much always present at my age — time really waits for no one,” Malkovich says. “But I don’t have it on my mind all the time. There’s no point in thinking about it. It won’t help anything at all. You should avoid it all you want. But the octopus is going to be on your face.”
Somehow, the whole thing feels very John Malkovich.
That same sense of existential absurdity runs through Malkovich’s newest film, “Wild Horse Nine,” which will open in theaters Nov. 6 and provides the actor with his juiciest film role in years — one that awards prognosticators are already whispering could land him his first Oscar nomination in 33 years. Malkovich, who earned his previous nominations playing an embittered blind boarder in the 1984 Depression-era drama “Places in the Heart” and a would-be presidential assassin in the 1993 thriller “In the Line of Fire,” generally doesn’t enjoy watching himself onscreen. That didn’t keep him from enjoying “Wild Horse Nine.”
“Watching myself is just a kind of black hole,” he says. “But I’m always happy to watch others and luckily I’m only one person in any given film. But yeah, I liked it.”
Written and directed by Martin McDonagh, whose darkly comic films include “In Bruges” (2008), “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017) and “The Banshees of Inisherin” (2022), the film is set in 1973 Chile during the months leading up to the military coup that would overthrow President Salvador Allende. Malkovich plays Chris, a veteran CIA operative dying of cancer who travels with his longtime agency partner and friend, Lee (Sam Rockwell), from Santiago to Easter Island on a getaway that gradually reveals a larger purpose. His body is failing, his memory is going and, after decades spent doing terrible things in the shadows of American foreign policy, Chris is taking stock of what it all amounted to.
Asked what he shares with Chris, Malkovich starts with the differences. “I’m not addicted to heroin, I don’t smoke anymore — as much as I’d like to — and I’m not prone to killing people,” he says. “But I think I have emotional similarities to Chris. To reflect on what you’ve done and what you haven’t done is a natural phase when you near the end of your life.”
Malkovich has made something of a specialty of intelligence types over the years, including an apoplectic CIA analyst in the Coen brothers’ 2008 comedy “Burn After Reading” and a paranoid former operative in the “Red” action-comedy films. But this character is harder to get a bead on: morally compromised yet strangely lovable, a heroin user who casually divulges state secrets and muses about whether dinosaurs have souls.
It’s a role Malkovich could not have played quite this way when he was younger. His famously measured delivery has slowed, his speech at times slightly slurred, bringing a natural sense of wear and vulnerability to Chris. “I think my voice has changed,” he says. “I hear it differently now. I hear it more labored and older and less clean, which I think is just a function of age.”
For McDonagh, what Malkovich brings to the role goes deeper than physicality. “Looking back, having regrets and sadness and guilt — I think you need to get to a certain age to commit fully to those things,” the writer-director says by phone from London. “John was never going to be playing just the surface. It’s in the quiet scenes especially, when he’s on his own looking out a window or thinking about his history, that John’s depth really comes through. You see it in his eyes.”
Despite having wanted to work with Malkovich for years, McDonagh admits he was intimidated when they finally met. “I was probably a little trepidatious before our first Zoom,” he says. “He’s played so many tough, angry parts that you kind of wonder if that is part of him. But he set me completely at ease and was just really kind and thoughtful, and that continued right through the filming.”
McDonagh could hardly be blamed for wondering. Over the years, the line between Malkovich and the characters he has played had become unusually blurry.
It started early. After emerging from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, the Illinois-born Malkovich made his Broadway debut as Biff in a 1984 revival of “Death of a Salesman” and quickly moved into movies, ranging from art-house films and prestige dramas to Hollywood blockbusters. Across wildly different roles, from an aristocratic seducer in 1988’s period drama “Dangerous Liaisons” to a criminal mastermind in 1997’s action blockbuster “Con Air,” Malkovich himself became increasingly recognizable — the deliberate cadence, the cerebral intensity, the peculiar mixture of refinement, menace and deadpan wit.
By 1999, John Malkovich was sufficiently “John Malkovich” that somebody could build an entire movie around the question of what it might be like to actually be him. “Being John Malkovich,” director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s hall-of-mirrors comedy, imagined a portal through which anyone could enter Malkovich’s mind and briefly inhabit him.
To Malkovich, “Being John Malkovich” is far more noteworthy for launching the filmmaking careers of Jonze and Kaufman, who both earned Oscar nominations, than for any part he had in it. “I’m a kind of non-story,” he says. “I don’t really think of ‘John Malkovich,’ whoever that is. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”
Other people aren’t always so sure who John Malkovich is either.
“People will say to me, ‘Has anyone ever told you that you look like what’s his name, the actor John MacLevich or John Markovic or John Novich or something like that?’” Malkovich says. “Usually I say no. Or I say, ‘Once or twice.’”
Recently, he was at Trader Joe’s buying some water when an older woman told him how much she loved him in the famous “More Cowbell” sketch on “Saturday Night Live.” Realizing her mistake — it was actually Christopher Walken, of course — she apologized.
“She said, ‘I’m so ashamed,’” Malkovich recalls. “Why would that be an insult? It’s an insult if you think you’re someone. I’m an actor. So what? I’ve done a lot of sketches — millions of actors have. And that is one of my favorite ‘SNL’ skits because Chris is hilarious.”
Fame may not interest Malkovich much, but the work has lost none of its pull, he says. Over time, he has only become more exacting about how he approaches it.
Early on, he remembers, “I just kind of accepted, ‘Oh, that’s the script. Oh, OK. You must know. You make movies.’ But when you make like 50 crappy ones, you just sort of go, ‘Well, actually, you don’t. This doesn’t seem to be your area of expertise.’”
These days, he worries over every line. “I like to hear something 100 times before I commit to saying it,” he says. “Does it move the story along? Does it reflect character? Could it be more elegantly phrased or more tellingly phrased?”
For all that scrutiny, Malkovich has never been a snob about the kind of work he does. He moves restlessly from one project — and one continent — to the next. Earlier this year, he finished shooting the second season of the Apple TV comedy “Bad Monkey,” then toured the U.S., South America and Europe with his classical-music programs: theatrical performances pairing his spoken-word narration with orchestras and chamber ensembles. He is currently shooting the Amazon crime series “Bishop” in Montreal and, after making other appearances this fall, will travel to Tokyo, where he will direct a stage adaptation of Natsuo Kirino’s 2003 noir novel “Real World.”
“I’m not much for looking down at genres,” he says. “American movies started as a business and there’s nothing wrong with that. In other parts of the world, say in Europe, it started as another form of expression. Nothing wrong with that either, but you have to understand, well, that doesn’t have a $180-million budget. I’ve always done a little — or a lot — of both.”
Malkovich lost most of his life savings in 2008 in financier Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, a blow that forced him, for a time, to work more and focus on jobs that paid. But he has never regarded retirement as particularly desirable.
“I’ve been incredibly lucky physically and mentally,” Malkovich says. “I’ve been able to keep working and I’ve been OK physically. I think work has been good for my health. Work to me has been the best companion, the best therapy, the greatest joy. I never thought it was a great idea to retire because when it’s time to retire, they will retire you — whoever ‘they’ are at any particular point in time.”
What matters to Malkovich is getting to do the work, not much of what comes after the shoot is done. That includes awards. The last time he was nominated for an Oscar, today’s monthslong grind of awards-season campaigning barely existed.
“There used to not be a machine,” he says. “You got nominated and somebody won. I didn’t do f— all. I never thought of myself as in competition with Raúl Juliá or Robert Duvall or Dustin Hoffman or any of these other actors. I don’t particularly love being in public and I don’t like giving speeches. If I’m on stage, sure, why not? But that’s not me.”
His memories of his first Oscars more than 40 years ago have little to do with the competition. Prince blew him a kiss. He sat next to David Lean. He was delighted when Haing S. Ngor won supporting actor for “The Killing Fields,” in which Malkovich also appeared. And he spent much of the ceremony outside in a hallway smoking.
At one point, a live elephant wearing a costume from “A Passage to India” strolled by him on its way to the stage. “I was watching the people following the elephant with enormous shovels the size of kind of street plows and scooping up its s—,” Malkovich says. “I thought, there is a scene in that.”
“I’ve been awarded a billion times over,” he continues, shrugging off the notion that he deserves more trophies. “The best payday I ever got was, I did a thing for the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and they knew I liked ‘The Night Watch,’ the Rembrandt painting. They said, ‘We can’t pay, but next time you’re in Amsterdam, come when the museum’s closed. We’ll bring the wine, and you can look at “The Night Watch” all you want. You can stay all night if you want.’”
Other, smaller rewards arise out of the work. In “Bishop,” Malkovich and Jennifer Jason Leigh play brother and sister in a wealthy San Francisco family. During one of the production’s marathon 16-hour days, the two found themselves at a table creating a little art piece out of a drawing Malkovich had made.
“It was just fantastically joyful,” he says. “I can’t imagine having any other job where one could be so childish and so investigatory at the same time for absolutely no reason whatsoever.”
Nicoletta and his friends occasionally ask him whether he will ever grow up.
“No, there’s no plan afoot for me to grow up,” Malkovich says. “I’m not going to grow up. I’ll just die like this.”
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