Crossover Artist

5 minute read
JAMES GRAFF

For a man who’s appalled by the intellectual corruption of consumer culture, John Malkovich sure likes clothes. In fact, being John Malkovich begins with the outfit. At an audience with journalists last week in the library of Les Salons France-Ameriques, a Second Empire mansion just off the Champs Elysées, Malkovich held court in a soft four-button suit and shawl-collared sweater, both in muted shades of beige. The ensemble, accessorized by an oversized beige attaché case that looked suspiciously crocodilian, typifies the look Malkovich is aiming for in his upcoming men’s clothing line, which he announced in August. But though he’s happy to expound on matters sartorial — “classic with tones of late fifties-early sixties California,” is how he describes his style — Malkovich has far more on his mind than fashion.

Malkovich’s new production, Hysteria, has drawn critical raves and been hailed as a high point of the new season at the prestigious Théâtre Marigny. The play, a Freud-meets-Dali folly that Malkovich first mounted three years ago with his home troupe at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, is his directorial debut in French. He’s also getting broader exposure playing the cynical and snakelike statesman Talleyrand in a miniseries on Napoleon currently running with great fanfare on French television. The role requires Malkovich to ooze the delicious malevolence he has made his signature, most memorably as Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons.

In person, though, Malkovich is nothing like his scary screen personas. “I’m not the least bit cynical or manipulative,” he says — but with enough forced grace to make you wonder whether he is being just that. He left America 13 years ago and for almost a decade has lived in the Luberon region of Provence with his partner, Nicoletta Peyran, and their two children, who speak French with a Provençal twang. He feels right at home in Europe where, he says, gifted people aren’t pigeonholed. America has experts, says Malkovich, but Europe can yield magisterial figures like the late Pier Paolo Pasolini, a political thinker, novelist and film director. Another inspiration: Jean-François Revel, whose bestselling book, The Anti-American Obsession, is only the latest reflection of the author’s catholic interests from Proust to political philosophy. “Here there is more apt to be infiltration from one form to another,” Malkovich says.

The theme of crossover — between theater and film, directing and acting, France and the U. S. — is central to Malkovich’s life. Early next year he’ll release The Dancer Upstairs, the first film he has directed. Based on a novel by British writer Nicholas Shakespeare, it tells the story of an investigator who reluctantly accepts the task of finding the terrorist Ezequiel, modeled on Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, the founder of Peru’s Shining Path. “It’s not really about terrorism,” says Malkovich. “It’s about a modern man, one who sees the way the world passes and fights his own corner.” A description Malkovich, with an indefinable look of bemusement, would likely accept for himself.

Q&A: ‘When all that matters about what you do is how much money it makes, clearly that’s bad.’

TIME: Are you any less American for living abroad?
Malkovich: I’m profoundly American, but there are many things that have long concerned me about my country.

TIME: Such as the way Hollywood works?
Malkovich: I don’t really know how Hollywood works. It’s a mystery to me. But when all that matters about whatever you do — whether it’s journalism, literature or another art form — is how much money it makes, clearly that’s bad. I’m not just entitled but obliged to voice that. Otherwise, we’ll raise a generation of nihilists.

TIME: And beyond Hollywood?
Malkovich: On Sept. 11, I turned on CNBC and unless I was dreaming — and I’m sure I wasn’t — between the first and second plane they were already talking about what would happen to hedge funds. When I was growing up, it was forbidden to talk about money or success. That’s the country I was raised in.

TIME: Do you ever feel compelled to confront a one-dimensional image of America here?
Malkovich: Well, it’s a pretty big country, with an extraordinarily disparate population. It takes incredible hubris to want to explain the place. There is room for lots of opinions. But if someone says Sept. 11 was the chickens coming home to roost, I ask how killing Ghanaians and French and the other 62 nationalities in those buildings served that purpose. If it was a taste of our own medicine, I wonder who’s the doctor, and what’s the prescription.

TIME: Why do you live in France?
Malkovich: Because I love it here. People assume it’s because of something I don’t like about America. But that’s not it. Life is brief. I spent 35 years in America and as far as I know, I only have one life. I’ve never had a bad day here.

TIME: What do mean when you say you’re frightened by the ugliness around us?
Malkovich: I mean intellectual corruption, religious teachings, and more than anything else poverty of the spirit. Just the idea that things were always crap, they will always be crap, so I might as well go shopping.

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com