John Malkovich has an excellent interview in GQ’s March issue, all to promote his role in Opus. He plays a pop star who disappeared for decades only to reemerge as some kind of cult leader with a new album. Malkovich is now 71 years old and he works constantly on a wide variety of projects on stage, screen and television, plus he’s got weird little side-gigs that he does for money or to help out friends. He lost everything in 2008 in Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme, so he basically had to rebuild his savings from scratch and say yes to nearly everything he’s been offered. Which is why he’s become one of the most prolific actors of his generation, as well as one of the oddest. I didn’t even know he lives full time in Boston so he can be close to his granddaughter, but that’s where the interview takes place – in a rented home in Boston, surrounded by his granddaughter’s dolls. Some highlights from GQ:
He’s always been interested in aesthetics: “I was always interested in how things looked and in giving something visual cohesion. An architect that I was working with on a project once said to me, ‘Everything doesn’t have to match.’ And I thought, Yes, it does. What the f–k are you talking about? Of course it has to match.”
Why he never married his partner Nicoletta Peyran: “It was just never a big deal. Never a goal of hers, never really a goal of mine. And my first one didn’t work out so well.”
His granddaughter: “Her various toys—some are friends, some are frenemies, some are really out,” he says, breaking down some recent drama she had with one of those dolls. “She’s quite a bullsh-t artist, so you never know if she’s trying to get one over on you, especially me.”
He swears he’s not eccentric: “My mother once referred to me as a plodder. I think that’s absolutely correct…I think I’m the least eccentric person I know, actually.”
What he remembers about making ‘Con Air’: “It was hilarious. It was like the first thing I’d ever done just with men. Con Air was the first time [working] with guys that I wouldn’t necessarily invite them all into the house. They were always inviting me to places—like the bar they’d adopted as their hangout was called American Bush. Listen, I can’t go to a bar called American Bush. I mean, sorry. But in truth, they were quite funny, some supersmart, but it was just so male. Just wildly male.”
He’s been asked to do Marvel movies but declined: “The reason I didn’t do them had nothing to do with any artistic considerations whatsoever. I didn’t like the deals they made, at all. These films are quite grueling to make…. If you’re going to hang from a crane in front of a green screen for six months, pay me. You don’t want to pay me, it’s cool, but then I don’t want to do it, because I’d rather be onstage, or be directing a play, or doing something else.”
Bad at business: “I’m very bad at business because if I was good at business, I’d be rich. And it’s true that I think it’s a talent, it’s a skill like any other, really, and I don’t have it.”
Losing his life savings in the Bernie Madoff scandal: “Well, of course it’s my fault. It’s my money. For two days, we were kind of, ‘Oh, what are we going to do?’ Because it was really basically everything I’d ever made. But after a couple of days we were counting our blessings. So it was a good thing, all in all, really, to tell you the truth. In the way that it reacquaints you with the notion that most people don’t have millions of dollars to lose and they’ll never even meet anyone who does. They’ll never make it for doing something they really want to do and be praised doing it in some absurd way. So it wasn’t a bad thing.”
Losing his dear friend Julian Sands: “I’ve lost a lot of people in my life. There were seven in my family starting out, now we are two. And lost many, many friends, colleagues, over the years. But that’s life. And death obviously is irrevocable, but Jules is someone that was a big loss because he was younger than me and I always figured because he was so healthy and fit and always climbing mountains and doing this. He was a caveman, point of fact. I imagined him kind of wandering the moors at 120. So it was a shock and a very unpleasurable one, but it’s just another loss. You have some friends that can’t be replaced.”
I love all of this and I wish I could read a John Malkovich interview every single day. He’s lovely. He IS eccentric, but in a nice way – he’s just unique and special and very talented. I love his description of his granddaughter as a “bulls–t artist” and his humility in describing losing his life savings. Kevin Spacey also lost his life savings in the Madoff situation too, and that’s why Spacey and Kyra Sedgwick worked so much post-2008 as well. Notice there’s never any story about him mistreating anyone or harassing anyone either – all of his coworkers have stories like “he shovels snow from his own driveway” and “he was the easiest person to work with, ever.”
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
