John Malkovich on Wild Horse Nine and “the most terrible line I’ve ever had to give”

You’d be forgiven for expecting an intense, if not downright intimidating presence, such is the figure John Malkovich often cuts on screen. Take him in the roles which were clipped and discussed at length at the actor’s LFF Screen Talk: the amoral seducer Valmont in Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988); a snapped would-be political assassin in Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire (1993); dying CIA spook Chris in Martin McDonagh’s new blackly comic thriller Wild Horse Nine, in which Malkovich veers unpredictably between impishness and menace.

But anyone wondering if Malkovich might bring to the BFI something like the energy he’s brought to a career specialising in the villainous and the unhinged were immediately disarmed. When host Mark Kermode began the Screen Talk by asking for a show of hands from those in the audience as to who’d seen The Yellow Tie (2025), the Malkovich-starring classical music drama that’s currently out in UK cinemas, Malkovich sheepishly raised his own hand to a burst of audience laughter.

More laughter, as Malkovich in his idiosyncratic way – the tone unwaveringly deadpan, the accent placed somewhere between the American Midwest and Mitteleuropa – revealed that he thought he only made a really good film “once every 10 years”, and that even interesting performances he’d given in so-so films were “absolutely meaningless… a total waste of [my] time and the public’s time”.

Self-deprecating throughout the talk, Malkovich framed even his inarguable successes in modest terms. “A little theatre we started in Chicago” was how Malkovich described the renowned Steppenwolf Theatre, where he got his start as an actor 50 years ago. As talk turned to Dangerous Liaisons and one of Malkovich’s signature screen turns, the actor amusingly recalled a meeting with Stephen Frears after the director had just watched Malkovich perform on stage: “He said, ‘So why actually are you never good in the cinema?’”

The transition from stage to screen acting proved somewhat tricky early on, said Malkovich, who had been accustomed to the pace and freedom of the empty space: “[With] theatre, every night you have the momentum of the piece behind you. [With] film, there’s no possibility of momentum – especially in the medieval times when I started working, because you had to wait an hour and a half for the lighting, for every set-up.”

Speaking of his In the Line of Fire co-star and Changeling (2008) director Clint Eastwood’s preference for minimal takes (versus his own stage-influenced preference for “hundreds” of them), Malkovich described an important realisation he had once his film career was established: “When you’re a movie actor, you are a figure in someone else’s dream. It is not your dream… Your job is to find out: what does your figure do in that dream?”

Though he firmly declared himself “not a political person”, Malkovich also expressed an enduring fascination with – and scepticism regarding the official account of – the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a topic which is at the emotional core of both In the Line of Fire and Wild Horse Nine: “I think Don DeLillo said it best in his magnificent novel Libra [which Malkovich adapted for the stage in 1994]; he referred to it as ‘The seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.’”

Pivoting to Spike Jonze’s metaphysical comedy Being John Malkovich (1999), Malkovich confessed that despite responding enthusiastically to the script by then-unknown screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, his first instinct was to direct the film and make a different actor the subject: “Why would I do a film called ‘Being John Malkovich’? What does that even mean?”

After Jonze charmed Malkovich into starring in the film as written, they together embarked on what at one point turned into a tetchy shoot, with footage of Malkovich “bitching at people” on the Being John Malkovich set subsequently used for the opening scene of Jonze and Kaufman’s metatextual follow-up, Adaptation (2002). Malkovich recalled how when Jonze later asked if anyone on the Being John Malkovich crew would like to throw a can at Malkovich’s head for a scene in the film, “every single person” raised their hands.

After more than four decades in movies, Malkovich is now content to place himself in the hands of a “very, very precise” director such as Martin McDonagh – to be, as it were, a figure in the filmmaker’s dream. Calling McDonagh “the best writer on the set no matter what the set is”, Malkovich cited one line in McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine script – Chris remembering Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba’s warning that his murder will be tantamount to “killing democracy in Africa for the next 50 years” – as “the most terrible line I’ve ever had to give”. It’s expected that Malkovich’s performance in the role, the centrepiece of McDonagh’s film, will earn Malkovich a third Academy Award nomination.

Malkovich stated somewhat ruefully that getting a star such as him on the long awards trail to publicise a character-driven piece like Wild Horse Nine was today “the only way to get people to go to the theatres”. The actor, though, remained sanguine: “I’m 72 years old. Things change. I don’t really like thinking ‘Things aren’t what they used to be’ – they just change. And you either change with them or die. And I prefer to change with them.” With a gallows humour fit for the world of McDonagh, Malkovich grinningly added: “I’ll die anyway.”

John Malkovich was speaking at his Screen Talk at the 70th BFI London Film Festival, where Wild Horse Nine has its UK premiere. Wild Horse Nine is in UK cinemas from 4 November.