John Malkovich, the American stage and screen superstar who is touring in Vilnius later this month, shares why he didn’t want to cancel a production by a Russian director – and why he would not perform in Russia right now.
On April 26-27, Vilnius will host a performance of In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, directed by the Russian director Timofey Kulyabin and produced by the Riga Dailes Theatre. John Malkovich is starring in it alongside his long-time collaborator and friend Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė.
What does it mean for Malkovich to work with the Lithuanian artist, whom he often calls simply Inga? Why hasn’t Hollywood succeeded in completely usurping him, why does he keep wanting to return to the stage? How does an American, and a man who has long considered himself apolitical, feel about answering questions about the war in Ukraine? Malkovich answers these questions in an interview with LRT KLASIKA.
Before this interview, I watched a lot of talks with you and I got the sense that you’re very self-critical, because whenever someone tells you you’re a great actor or your voice is great, you tend to disagree with the journalist. So have you ever told yourself that you’re actually a great actor?
It’s just not something I’d ever think about. I think about the business at hand, the work. There are a lot of actors I love, but I’m not sure ‘great’ really is required. It’s work, it’s constant work, especially in the theatre. I don’t know that I’d look back at something I did and not say: I have maybe a better idea about that now. That’s just that's just the nature of the beast.
And myself as an entity, it’s just not something I think about, or what I did or didn’t do. I just think about the work. Of course, it’s work I’m doing because it’s me. But beyond that, I just don’t have thoughts about things like that.
In Lithuania, I have a chance to speak with different actors and a lot of them talk about this public image and that it helps them to get a higher sense of their profession and use it for a good cause.
To each his own. But I don’t use whatever my alleged position or alleged talent is for a higher cause. I concentrate on my work and the work of the people that are my colleagues and my collaborators. I don’t desire to tell people how to live or what to think or how they should feel or blah, blah, blah. That’s just not in my mental, emotional, psychological makeup.
You’re coming to Vilnius very soon, this time as a theatre actor. You started from theatre, even though, since you’re an international star, a lot of people know you from cinema. How did your transition to cinema happen? You’ve said in on interview that you only had one audition for a film role in your entire career.
If I did, or I don’t even remember… Oh, I did! I did with Martin Scorsese.
I started out with the theatre called Steppenwolf, which we started with a number of colleagues and friends in 1976, the day we graduated university. And we became quite a known theatre in Chicago, which was where we started our theatre.
Then in 1982, we took our first production to New York, which was off-Broadway play called True West, and that gave us a sort of national notoriety. And fairly soon after, it became an international in notoriety because a number of our actors have had quite successful movie and television careers, and successful theatre careers, both in America and abroad.
And that’s how I first got noticed. Mostly, I think, because two American actors, Robert Duvall and Susan Sarandon, had come to see this play I was in and told a bunch of directors – everybody from Scorsese to Mike Nichols to Michelangelo Antonioni, Louis Malle – go and see this play. And that’s how my movie career started, from the one play I did in New York. I stayed in New York for a few years, I did several other plays as an actor and director, and our theatre did many other plays in New York and London and Australia, most of them in the English-speaking world.
One hears a lot of stories about famous actors having a bunch of unsuccessful auditions. And you can remember just one. How is that possible?
I never thought about it, really. I mean, for instance, I’ve just auditioned, you could say, for a thing for Apple. But one thing I would say is I think actors have a tendency to think everything that happens in the world is about them.
You know, auditions are very funny, I say this as a director. If you come in and this young woman comes, and another young woman comes in, it’s not always about you. It’s a kind of voodoo. You don’t know why you choose this person and not that person, because generally you only got to choose one person for this particular job. Why? I have no idea. I don’t think it’s something I would take fantastically to heart.
But the real answer to your question is because we started a company, so people came and saw what we did. And part of what you did is what you’re capable of doing. That’s not always the case, but sometimes it is. And they liked it enough that they gave many of us jobs. That’s really why I never auditioned much, because one job kind of led to another, which led to another and another. And then, you know, 45 years passed.
Your answer to many question is ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t really think about it’. Is there something that you actually think about your profession like profoundly in a philosophical sense?
I’d have to divide it up into several categories. The first part of the answer would be, well, what am I doing as a job? What is my occupation? What is my task in this particular theatre production? Am I directing, am I costuming, am I acting, am I writing?
I came to believe very late in my life, probably in my 50s, that being a theatre actor was like being a surfer. Because what do surfers do? They surf. And what do they surf? The waves. And what are the waves?
I think when I was young, I probably thought I and my colleagues were the wave. Now I think we’re the surfers. And the wave is created by the collision between the material and the public. If it’s good material, it will make a wave and we ride it.
Directing is not quite that. Directing is like being the surfing coach. Saying: you see, when you turned here and you went down this path and the wave crossed you and your board went 30 feet in the air and you broke your foot or whatever or separated your shoulder, had you done X, we might have had a different result.
Movies are a whole different thing and not really even cousins with work in the theatre, they’re not really that close. They’re kind of cousins twice removed. One is living and organic and ephemeral, and the other is dead and plastic and fixed and can’t be altered. It’s a fixed thing, a plastic art.
I’m not necessarily talking about the creation of it because that also has many elements, but that’s how I think about it. And I take it quite seriously to whatever extent, not like some kind of maniac. It’s work and very interesting work and very interesting work to me, at least. Maybe not to others, but to me.
What drew you back to theatre after you became a Hollywood star? For outsiders, it may seem that the Hollywood lights are very tempting and hard to leave.
Not for me. It wouldn’t be hard to leave. Theatre’s what I grew up doing, I do it all the time. I still do it and I’ll continue to do it as long as I can.
I think, first of all, many movie actors that weren’t trained on the stage, they don’t have experience of this thing, so they really couldn’t know what it is. I’ve done both and I know what both are, but I was trained. It’s like being trained as a pianist and then you get known for playing the saxophone. It’s fine, it’s music, but my training was in the theatre. That’s where I’ve spent thousands and thousands of evenings and days of my life for over 40 years.
In late April, audiences in Vilnius will see you perform in the play In the Solitude of Cotton Fields. What was the creative process of this production?
We started working on this play in during the pandemic in 2020, maybe 2021. We worked a long time before it was performed and this was before the war in Ukraine and before all the tragedy and the ramifications and horrors of that had come to us.
I think it was decided to play it in a kind of neutral place where we don’t have a history, a non-English-speaking public. So the Dailes Theatre in Riga took a risk on it and we partnered with them and the Onassis Center, got the funding for it.
For us, I think, it was an ideal venue because it then gives you an idea: will people understand this play, if English is not their native language? It’s not a circus play, it’s very literary, very language-heavy. So how can we do this to mount a what’s essentially a touring production and that’s not necessarily going to be in the West End for eight months or on Broadway for a year and a half. We’ll go to various places.
And that’s how we ended up in Riga and we’re very happy to have done so.
I heard in another interview that there were talks or thoughts about cancelling the production when the war started. Why? Was it because the director and much of the team are Russian?
Only Inga [Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė] and I are not Russian. And Inga lived in Moscow and was super successful there for many years.
But yeah, because, you know, for obvious reasons, there are very strong feelings, war has a tendency to generate very strong feelings and most of them not very positive.
All my colleagues left Russia, which I think is a very hard thing for them to do. But that’s their decision. So I thought it really not fitting at all that we cancel. I was very much against cancelling it.
You were asked about the Ukraine war many times. Given that Ukraine is very far from your home country and the US is involved in many other wars, do you sometimes feel that you lack emotional involvement in this particular war? How do you feel when you as an American have to answer questions about the war in Ukraine?
Well, I pretty much always say the same thing. The American novelist William Faulkner wrote a book called The Sound and The Fury and I always thought it had the best sentiment about war of anything I’ve ever read, which is “no battle is ever won [..]. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
I think that’s a pretty accurate summation of my feelings, you know. On the other hand, of course, when you’re attacked, you have to defend yourselves.
And Russians would say – well, some Russians anyway – well, we were attacked in Donbass for X number of years and we lost 13, 14,000 citizens.
I performed in Moscow, I performed in Saint Petersburg, I performed in Kyiv too. To me, any war is... I don’t know what to say about it except it’s so heartbreaking and pointless because what does it solve?
And Ukraine obviously has a very, very complex and mostly unpleasant history with the Soviet Union, as does Lithuania, as does Poland, as does Estonia, Latvia. And if you know Soviet history and you know about the Holodomor, you can understand why a regime that comes from Russia may not be welcomed with roses and given sovereignty over Ukraine.
I’m not sure Americans really should be in any position to talk about anything, because as I’ve said, Americans have given a war just about every year since I was born.
You have performed or filmed in Russia a lot of times. Would you go there now, when the war is happening, for a performance or something like that if you were invited?
No. In lives, there are actions and then there are what people take from actions. I’m against the boycotting of artists, but I wouldn’t perform there right now.
You’re working with the Lithuanian actor Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė, you know her pretty well as this is not the first time you meet as two artists. What were your first personal and cultural encounter and how has your relationship evolved?
Ingeborga is really my closest colleagues since the early 1990s. This is, I don’t know, our tenth collaboration together. We’ve done plays, movies, operas, fashion movies, all kinds of things.
I always say this, but Ingeborga is the colleague I most prefer to be with me if I’m doing something that has a very high degree of difficulty. Because she’s very, very gifted. She’s very, very tough. She is a relentless worker towards improvement and towards trying to make something as good as it can possibly be.
Her contributions are always invaluable to me. Her work ethic is of the highest order of a really spectacular standard. And we’ve worked together for over 30 years and for me it’s always a delight. I just finished rehearsing with her on Zoom just about an hour ago, because we have to get ready for Vilnius and Tallinn.
Newsletter
Every Friday morning.
