This is all my fault for not moving homes or cities, for not taking certain jobs or marrying certain men, for looking backward all the time when I should be looking forward. I dwell too much. I hold on to things I shouldn’t, to people I shouldn’t. If you don’t change, change will find you in its most unruly form. It will press down on your vulnerabilities until they squish out the edges. Life needs volunteers or else it will start calling on people at random.
If we take style to mean a manner of doing something, could you articulate the John Malkovich style? Not really, because it’s not something I think about much — what I am or what I do. But I’ve always felt style is the only constant in life. By style I mean, simply, the way you move through life. If you get sad news, how do you respond? What do you do if you’re angry, if you’re amused, if you’re moved? That’s what style is. It’s not really up to me to say what mine is.
The book has a long interview with you where you say: “I’m capable of belief, at least inside the theater. Outside of the theater, not so much.” Why? Because that’s what my life has taught me. It took me seven years of analysis to learn that when people said something, it isn’t necessarily what they meant. I’m not very clever. I remember once meeting the head of a country — I won’t say which one — at a dinner one night after a performance in a faraway land. He kept telling me about how uncorrupt the country was because he was running it. I think he’s still in prison. That’s what I mean. Theater, it’s a perfect world. Life is more like making a movie: push a boulder up a hill every day and hope it doesn’t flatten you. So I’ve always felt most at home in the theater — at home with myself, my emotions, my colleagues, their emotions, with how we express them. That’s harder to find in life.about:blank
Aside from work, what do you believe in? I believe in people, generally. I believe in humanity, somewhat. I have a great mistrust of ideology. Maybe even more than I do religion. I’m not a believer, but I don’t make some big show of it. I’m wary of all the things that people believe that make them think they’re them.
Aside from Charlie Sheen’s work, what might you turn to when you’re trying to combat existential malaise? I’m not very existential because I’m not profound. So many people think a lot about this or that. I don’t think about this or that. I just do this or that.
Hard to say. That’s my problem.
That makes me think of your being able to find belief in the theater more easily than outside. So many things in life are kind of unsolvable and therefore, at a certain point, incredibly tiresome. People feel that and then absolutely know the opposite is true. As they say in New Jersey, “g’head.” I don’t know.
I want to go back to the line that you quoted from “Death of a Salesman”: “Life is a casting off.” You’re 70 now. What are you casting off? You have to let go of the past, of connections. At this age, there are people who are dead now that were very close to me. There are people I love to have a conversation with — who I sometimes dream of and have the conversation in dreams — that I’ll never see again. That’s a natural part of life. You have to let it go. It’s cast off in the sense that it’s allowed to float away. It’s also not weighing you down. It’s gone.about:blank
And what are you holding on to? Family, work, friends. Not as many as I used to because some people close to me didn’t choose to maintain that relationship, and sometimes I didn’t choose to, which, of course, is everyone’s choice. I just, as Joan Didion said, play it as it lays.
— John Malkovich, excerpts from “John Malkovich on (Really) Being John Malkovich” interview by David Marchese (NY Times, January 28, 2024)
If there is a problem somewhere,” he said with his dry chuckle, “This is what happens: Three people will try to do something concrete to settle the issue. Ten people will give a lecture analysing what the three are doing. One hundred people will commend or condemn the ten for their lecture. One thousand people will argue about the problem. And one person—only one—will involve [himself or herself] so deeply in the true solution that they are too busy to listen to any of it.” Now asked gently, his penetrating eyes meeting each of ours in turn, “which person are you?”
