John Malkovich stands out as the character actor of our times. Anyone whohas seen him in In the Line of Fire has been stunned by the intensity of his portrayals of the darker sides of human nature. "Scary" is the word people often use. Sure, we distinguish between the image and the man; we sense an intelligence there that just can't be faked. How does he portray abnormal states of mind so persuasively?
We caught up with Malkovich in Chicago, where he is directing a play about Lee Harvey Oswald. If Malkovich the actor excels at playing elusive characters who never let you in, the same turns out to be true of Malkovich the man.
PT: You have talked about somebody named Tony, a person you described as representing a quasi crazy or psychotic episode.
JM: I was a child, seven- to ten-ish. And I began to ask people to call me Tony. It was a kind of West Side Story thing. Tony was much thinner than me and more suave, altogether Italian, if I remember correctly.
We had a grape arbor that faced the window of an old, old stable in the back of our house. I would wear a baseball pitcher's outfit, my hat, and then a scarf of my mother's for a little bit of a Tony flair. And I would pitch grapes at the window in the arbor, and in the window. I was left-handed, which, of course, was much more exotic than being right-handed.
PT: Why did that stand out so much in your mind?
JM: I'm not a particularly uncomfortable person in my own skin or my own human psychology at all. But the fact is I'm just as comfortable being someone else too. If anything, it was an indication of that, that I may as well be someone else.
PT: Is the chameleon appeal of being an actor or actress connected to that?
JM: Well, partially. When people talk about the chameleon aspect of acting--even though its actually quite accurate--they make the assumption that there's something you start from that you change into. I'm not sure there's a thing I start from. One just changes.
PT: No core sense of self?
JM: A core sense of self very definitely, but not necessarily that's work-related. In terms of being an actor, I don't think, "Oh, I would never do this or that." I have a tendency to view the world as the character views the world. I don't much enter into the equation, for good or bad.
PT: So unlike, say, a John Wayne, who's always John Wayne, you're more a Dustin Hoffman, who becomes the role.
JM: He's much more deliberate than I in his work. His work is quite methodical. I'm much more intuitive or instinctive. I don't plan Tony. Tony is what is.
PT: You mean it's not cognitive or conscious, it's the lizard part of the brain?
JM: Yeah.
PT: I've heard you say that you're in psychoanalysis. Is this relatively new? How long have you been in?
JM: Four or five years.
PT: How often do you go when you're in town?
JM: Twice a week, sometimes once a week. It really is totally dependent on the schedule. I actually started out going several times a week.
It's quite obvious that people go into analysis because they're in trouble, they've lost some portion of themselves in some way, or mislocated it, or they simply feel their lives are not working as well as they might. They try to find out about that, and I think that's great.
PT: Your one criticism of therapy, as I remember it, was that people use it to blame others for their problems.
JM: I would never blame anybody for the way I am. In analysis I don't talk so much about my parents, what they did or didn't do. I think they did their very best. People do use it to say that someone did this to me and that's why I feel the way I do. But that's hardly the point of it at all.
PT: They have to get through that.
JM: Unfortunately, they usually get through that out loud. If there's something that caused you some amount of pain or suffering or hardship, I think you have to look at that and think why it hurt you and whether it would still hurt you. If the answer is yes, you have to try and ascertain how you would keep yourself out of that kind of situation in the future.
PT: Creative people, artists, often express a fear of losing what they might consider the neurotic edge to their creativity.
JM: I was never neurotic in any way about work, and it's totally unaffected. In fact, at times it actually may have helped. I might explain a particular point to the person I see or ask a particular question on a very basic level about human psychology.
It just hasn't been the case. I did some very good work and some not so good work before analysis, and that's carried on since. There is another element in the kind of work that I do that's even outside of psychology. There's our understanding of what a character says, and the understanding that they say this or that because they really mean it. Beyond those levels of meaning there is yet a third one that is neither of those. It is more instinctive. And this thing or force to me has never changed. It's always been there immediately.
If I listen, say, to a speech like the speech [Lee Harvey] Oswald's mother gives in this play [Libra, which we are producing at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago], whether I'd been in analysis or not my reaction would always be the same, 10 years ago or at age five. I watched Peter Pan with my children a couple of weeks ago, and my reaction was exactly the same.
PT: Jungian archetypes.
JM: Probably.
PT: Which roles in plays or movies do you think were singularly the most expressive of who you are?
Tags:
actor,
chameleon,
creativity,
flair,
grapes,
human psychology,
ish,
John Malkovich,
own skin,
portrayals,
psychoanalysis,
psychotic episode,
psychotic episodes,
scarf,
states of mind,
west side story
