The multifaceted John Malkovich

John Malkovich and I are ensconced in his hotel room in Recklinghausen, near Düsseldorf, having a cosy chat about murder – and, in particular, the Austrian serial killer, Jack Unterweger, who is the latest in a line of mad, bad and dangerous characters the actor has inhabited in his long career.

He’s playing the celebrity killer-author in The Infernal Comedy, accompanied by a baroque orchestra and two sopranos, singing arias by Beethoven, Haydn, Weber and Mozart; the beauty of their voices and the music help to invest the victims of Unterweger’s murderous game with the dignity he denied them.

I say that what with the current production at the National Theatre, London Road, which looks at the effect of Steve Wright’s murders of five prostitutes on the inhabitants of Ipswich in 2006, and now The Infernal Comedy, we just need one more musical treatment of a serial killer for it to constitute a trend. “Oh, yesss,” Malkovich purrs. “Absolutely.”

More than most actors, Malkovich’s voice has a singular, instantly recognisable quality – with its dreamy, hypnotic drawl, which he employs to equally good effect as either a lover or a killer. (He can also do “funny”, as in Being John Malkovich or Burn After Reading.) His speaking voice is incredibly attractive, so it was a surprise to read that he dislikes it. Is that really the case? “I don’t really listen to it,” he says, stretching out on the sofa like a big languid cat (he is tremendously elegant despite his sturdy frame). “I mean, I can’t ever imagine being in a situation that desperate… But, of course, one’s speaking voice you’re obliged to hear occasionally. I mean, even if you’re not in our business. No, I don’t particularly like my voice but I’m not going to, like, obsess about it.”

He’s in Germany to perform The Giacomo Variations, described as a chamber opera play and created by the same team behind The Infernal Comedy. It will be coming to London next year. Malkovich plays Casanova towards the end of his life, reminiscing over his loves and sexual appetites.

He sings three or four times during Giacomo, and is working on an aria he will be performing as the piece evolves. Does he enjoy the singing? “Yeah, sure,” he answers perkily. He says that he’d be more anxious about it if he were carrying the singing load because, “In my circumstances, I not only have modest ambitions but a modest talent.” Does singing make you feel particularly naked? “Yeah, but, you know… I’m 57 years old. I mean, I’m used to people hating or not liking what I do.” His voice is strained, however, because of his schedule – performing eight times a week, in shows that involve a great deal of speaking and shouting, too.

For this reason, he drinks quantities of lemon and honey tea and sucks on ginger bonbons. He offers me one and I cannot help yelping when there’s a sudden kamikaze blast of heat on my tongue as the centre dissolves. From time to time, he gets up to help himself to shots of coffee from his Nespresso machine. (He plays God to George Clooney knocking on Heaven’s door in the Nespresso ad.) Throughout the interview, he has his leg up on the sofa because his knee, which has caused him grief for years, has recently been operated on. By his feet is a knee brace which, presumably, he straps on for performances. Every day, he has an hour of physiotherapy and devotes an hour and a half to the gym.

He describes himself “as a little bit of a gym rat” and used to spend up to four hours a day cycling, running and rowing. Weights? “No, I even hate that look, actually.” He tried Pilates for a year, “but it kind of drove me nuts”.

How does he feel about the ageing process? “It’s not very pleasant. I mean, life ends badly. This is the same for me as for everyone in the history of humanity.” At this point, he has a curious inflection, as though he is a foreigner attempting to speak English correctly. “But it’s very rare that I think, ‘Oh, I wish I were 47 or 37’ – and 20, never – but that would be like once every 18 years.

“I have the normal aches and pains but I can’t complain because I’ve enjoyed just absolutely spectacular health. You know, a lot of people spend their whole lives just beset by problems that can’t be overcome – and I’ve never really had any problems.”

This isn’t quite true. We last met, 13 years ago, in Chicago when he was playing Rochester with his beloved Steppenwolf theatre company, which he helped to found in his twenties. He was just emerging from seven years of psychoanalysis, after a breakdown – a year in which, as he put it, “I couldn’t stop crying” – which followed the end of his marriage to fellow actress Glenne Headly, after his off-screen romance with Michelle Pfeiffer, his love interest in Dangerous Liaisons.

His analyst was coming to see the actor perform for the first time, in the last week of the play, to mark the end of their long association. When I remind him of that momentous event, he grins: “Yeah, it was only after the first few years that he said to me, ‘By the way, what do you do for a living?’ And I said, ‘You know, I do this and that in showbusiness,’ and he was so shocked.” But how could he not recognise you? He knew your name, right? “Well, I don’t think he was really a movie-goer.”

That encounter could not have been more different from this one. Malkovich had arrived, thoughtfully bearing a cup of coffee for me as well as him, and a bag of pastries. But it went downhill from there. I repeatedly had to endure what I described then – and I can still remember what it felt like – as his trademark cosh of the extended silence. His record in that meeting was 60 seconds. He was also incredibly combative and descended into a number of rants about his public (“I think they are ignorant. Some of them are intensely stupid”); his contempt for the way liberals link crime with poverty and lack of education; his loathing of modern parenting skills; his passionate belief in capital punishment; his absolute contempt for most cinema.

This time round, there are no uneasy silences and no aggression. We bumped into each other in the hotel foyer, where Malkovich cut a marvellous figure – reminiscent of Gatsby or a Henry James character – dressed in white linen trousers and jacket, a shirt collar with starched wings, a beautiful tie drenched in dark reds fading into one another, like a miniature Rothko, and the surprise of a hulking pair of Dr Martens-esque boots. He smiled warmly and brought up our last meeting in Chicago in a friendly way.

I hesitate to suggest that he has mellowed – partly because it’s such a dreary observation and one that could provoke more of the old behaviour. Also that’s not quite it, since “mellow” suggests a level of detachment and he is still very much engaged in the here and now. But he certainly seems calmer and less angry; not so keen to provoke an argument and more reasoned in his arguing. The only time there is a hint of disdain is in his tone as he speaks about some women’s unfathomable attraction to killers. But then his sympathies are entirely engaged with the powerless victims of the likes of Unterweger.

The Unterweger story – one that has fascinated Malkovich for years – is extraordinary and compelling, and what is odd is that it is not more widely known. The killer was a pretty young man; in an early photograph of him in 1975, he has the soulful gaze and cupid lips of a David Cassidy. This was the year that Unterweger, the neglected consequence of a fling between an Austrian teenage barmaid and an American soldier, was imprisoned for killing an 18-year-old girl whose house he had entered on one of his thieving sprees.

During his 15 years of incarceration, from the age of 25 to 40, Unterweger took correspondence courses in literature and writing and began to submit his own children’s stories to the radio, which broadcast 50 of them. He wrote a play, Terminus Prison, and was allowed out to attend its premiere at the Vienna People’s Theatre. He gave televised readings in the prison hall which were attended by intellectuals and representatives from the government. He wrote a volume of poetry and in 1982 his autobiography, Purgatory, was published and then made into a film. His books were taught in schools in Austria.

Unterweger became the poster boy for (apparently successful) rehabilitation and was released after a campaign by the country’s leading writers and artists, including Nobel prizewinners Elfriede Jelinek and Günter Grass. In the year after his release, Unterweger published two novels, produced two plays and parlayed himself into becoming a widely read investigative crime reporter. He also committed three murders of his own. Between 1990 and 1992, he killed 11 prostitutes in Vienna, Prague and Los Angeles, strangling his victims with their own bra straps in a trademark special knot.

What is astonishing – and scarcely believable – is that Unterweger was working closely with the police, both in his own country and the USA, and then filing stories for respected publications back home on the very serial murders he had committed. Finally tracked down in Miami, he was flown back to Vienna, tried, found guilty and committed suicide in his cell on the night of the verdict. A final bizarre twist to the twisted tale is that, because of a technicality in Austrian law, since he died before he could make an appeal, Unterweger remains officially innocent. You can almost hear the hollow laughter of the killer – whom the FBI described as “a uniquely high-functioning psychopath” – that even beyond this life, he has managed to outwit justice.

The Infernal Comedy is partly a play on this conceit, with Malkovich as Unterweger promoting his posthumous autobiography with its Dante-referenced title. Even on DVD, the recording of the live show is mesmerising. Malkovich strolls onto the stage in a white suit and white loafers, polka-dot shirt and shades, and proceeds to captivate the audience. The way in which he switches, in an instant, from tenderness to seductiveness to savagery is horribly convincing; caressing the divas, in turn, as they sing and then violently strangling them.

The project started in 2008, when writer Michael Sturminger and composer, music director Martin Haselböck, a fellow Austrian, were looking to find a new way to unite classical music with contemporary acting. Haselböck met Malkovich in Los Angeles and the two men tossed around various ideas for a show until the actor, who is also a director and producer (his Mr Mudd film company produced the indie hit Juno), said, “The other ideas are interesting but if we really want people to come, we should do an opera about Jack Unterweger.”

Malkovich has played some fascinatingly loathsome characters in his 30-odd years as an actor, on stage (the licentious 17th-century bard, the Earl of Rochester, in The Libertine) and in films (the cold sensualist Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons; sociopaths in Con Air and In the Line of Fire) but I wonder whether this new role, based on a real person, is more unsettling or, to him, is it just another part?

“I don’t think of it as unsettling. Without saying something as mundane as it being therapeutic, it’s kind of good exercise – it’s like going to an emotional gym,” he says. “I mean, it makes you deliberate on certain things and I think the very fine thing that Michael did with the script is that this actually recreates what the Viennese felt when they met Jack Unterweger. You know, this guy comes out and he’s kind of goofy and charming and funny and he has a lot of silly jokes and is clearly quite haunted and awkward, but also clever and entertaining and then, eventually, they realise that it’s a continuous series of screens: behind that screen is a monster and behind it a person, and behind it a monster, and behind it a person… This is someone who never should have been out in public. Ever – for any reason. But in our modern system, he is.”

For Malkovich, it’s essentially a story about our desire to believe in the healing possibilities of redemption – even when the story, in this case, has a disastrously unhappy ending. “In our Judaeo-Christian society and belief structure, redemption is very important to us and we’re taught that – on the road to redemption – that’s why you say, ‘You know, I behaved badly and I’m sorry for doing this’. [Something we never heard from Unterweger.]

“And that’s a natural thing in people and I think rather great – and necessary. Then there’s the question beyond that: are we redeemable? Tough call. I really couldn’t say.”

I wonder whether Malkovich is fascinated by the character he plays. “No, no… I’m repelled. But, you see, that doesn’t mean the person isn’t human or doesn’t have some degree of charm or humour – maybe, even, some good qualities. I used to go to the café in Vienna where Unterweger used to go, and a person who worked there said he was very nice. But it’s not a surprise that these people can be charming or that they can be witty and clever – how do you think they get people to go into their car?”

Unterweger, in common with so many serial killers, targeted the most vulnerable women he could find. In addition, he was a celebrity, making numerous appearances on television chat shows. Malkovich had seen him on one such show, when Unterweger was already well into his killing game. In his role as a journalist, he had been sent to Los Angeles by an Austrian magazine to do a reportage piece on American prostitutes and their struggle to be unionised.

“And he arguably made the quality of their life slightly worse in that he strangled them all after he interviewed them – I mean, maybe there are worse things than not having a union,” Malkovich says, deadpan.

“For me, it’s inconceivable to want to harm a person you don’t know who’s done nothing to you – whom you have to seek out and also is less powerful than you. In other words, this isn’t a person who could represent any kind of threat back. And this isn’t a person who has personally made you angry or personally made you suffer something or personally done anything to you. I mean, to me that’s the definition of barking mad. It’s a weird, sad pathology and a weird, sad world.”

Do you think he got a sexual thrill out of it? “Yes, sure, I mean obviously that’s part of it, but I think a lot of it was just power and once you decide to elevate yourself to a kind of god status, as the final arbiter of life and death, I’m done with you.”

How does Malkovich explain the killer’s attractiveness to women (he had legions of female wellwishers as well as girlfriends)? “I think his celebrity was part of it and it helps if they’re cute, of course, like Jack Unterweger or Ted Bundy, because girls love that,” he says, witheringly. “And, of course, they’re attracted to that element of danger.

“I don’t think he felt when he was killing any more than a person would feel stepping on a piece of grass. You know, they’re not big on empathy, these people. The thought of getting away with it, the thought that they’re too clever to get caught, all of that I think they find exciting – and some people probably do it when they’re feeling really good about themselves. It’s kind of, like, ‘OK, I’m out of prison, I’ve become celebrated, I’ve been on TV and stuff. You know what? I think I’m gonna kill someone. Wow, nice,’ ” he whispers in a silky, psycho voice.

After murder, we move on to fashion. When I was having lunch in town with the Austrians, Haselböck and Sturminger, I could not help noticing the latter’s amazing threads: a jacket with lovely deconstructed details, a strip of textile emerging from his pockets and from under his collar, and a feminine blouse with a tie collar, under a butch, knobbly sweater. When I commented on his attire, Sturminger smiled, with delight, and said that it was from Malkovich’s clothing line, Technobohemian, and had been a gift from the actor.

This clothes designing seems to be an expensive hobby of Malkovich’s, since it does not appear to be profitable, but he clearly loves it. He is generous to his friends, and his first collection, Uncle Kimono, was specifically created for half a dozen chums, including the actors Johnny Depp and Javier Bardem, the director Bernardo Bertolucci (with whom he worked on The Sheltering Sky; his French-Italian partner, Nicole Peyran, was working as the director’s assistant on the film) and various other close colleagues.

Back in the hotel suite, Malkovich reaches for his laptop and scrolls down image after image from his collections; clothes so beautiful that they make me want to be a man: stunning fabrics and incongruous yet perfect pairings of tweed with linen, delicate details with sturdy knitwear. Responding to my enthusiasm, Malkovich goes into his room and returns with a pair of what he calls his pyjama pants, “made out of super-super-light linen”.

The Malkovich line is stocked in cool shops in Italy, Amsterdam and Berlin, but not in the UK. How come? “Liberty said they really liked them, but didn’t take them. The guy at Harvey Nichols was fantastically straight and quick, I really liked him – Richard Johnson – but most of them you just never hear back from.

“So since I’m the one selling them myself [imagine hearing John Malkovich’s voice on the answerphone; the buyers probably think it’s a spoof], it all depends on how much time I have.” But why won’t you do a line for women? “It’s not that I’m not interested, but I already lose a ton of money doing this – I don’t particularly want to lose a bunch more – and I don’t really have the time for it.”

Before he snaps shut his laptop, I notice his screen saver is a photo of a lovely-faced woman with a serene expression and long grey hair. Is that Nicole? Yes, he says, it is. The couple have been living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for some years – with their children, Amandine, 20, and Loewy, 19 (named after the industrial designer, Raymond Loewy) – attending the lycée in Boston. But he still considers their house in Provence, near Aix, which he designed, to be home. It looks out on to the castle of the Marquis de Sade, but this was not, Malkovich says, part of the attraction.

His houses have appeared in interiors magazines and he clearly has as much of a distinctive style for decor as he does for clothes. He likes some modern art but would not call himself a collector, preferring to acquire books and fabric. (One of his hobbies, fantastically and famously, is embroidery.) Does he hang the fabrics on walls? “No, I keep them like a miser.”

What seems to matter more to him are objects associated with friends. Friendship is clearly important to him; although he doesn’t say anything so obvious, the anecdotes he tells suggest that he is loyal and considerate towards those who are close to him. When I ask him if he has a favourite painting or piece of furniture, he talks about a little business he helped a close friend of Nicole’s to run, Claudio, who died of Aids a few years ago. “He had a company in Morocco that he called Barbara Hatton, because he couldn’t use Barbara Hutton’s name – poor little rich girl – and he designed really funny, silly pieces, all of which I really loved.

“He did a very funny standing lamp with a metal high heel as a base and a white feather shade – you know, sort of hyper-gay. He did about ten pieces that he gave to us.”

He also has a number of drawings by an American artist called Thomas King Baker, an insurance underwriter, whose work, “not really valuable, at all, probably”, he discovered at an outsider artists’ gallery in Los Angeles. He tells a story of how he bought one of the pieces – an old-fashioned appointment calendar, with whimsical, witty drawings on each page, for his best friend and producing partner at Mr Mudd, Russ Smith, only to discover that Baker had been Smith’s uncle. “Imagine the odds of that. Isn’t it just the strangest story? My best friend for nearly 40 years now and I had no inkling; he had never discussed that side of his family.”

I wonder whether he can imagine his life without children. “I hate to say this, because I think it puts enormous pressure on children and I don’t want them to have pressure, but I don’t remember my life before I had them. It seems like it never happened. So for myself, and I think for Nicole also, they have always been our major focus,” he says.

“I was a very hands-on parent, but I think you’ve got to let kids find their own way. They’re not going to listen to you anyway.” Have you found it tough letting go of them? “Yeah, sure, of course. It’s terrible. I found it really hard but when I left home at 18, I was the second one to go, and although my parents would never, ever have said anything, I sensed that I was kind of leaving them in the lurch.

“But you have to let your kids go and if they come back, it’s fantastic. I’m always delighted to hear from them. Even if it’s bad news, it’s OK,” he says.

Amandine and Loewy were recently with their father in Vienna and in Prato, near Florence, where he has one of his clothes shops, and he sounds every bit the proud father describing how everyone thought “they were charming and bright and witty and blah blah blah. But, you know, I’m sure it’s not fun to have a father who’s known. They’ve never mentioned it and so maybe it’s nothing but… Well, I really love them and I think they have a lot of great qualities but they’ve had the usual BS that all kids have.”

The children have an American accent although they always speak French with their mother. They all seem to enjoy good food and wine and love to cook. “Amandine is a fantastic cook but a little like me, I think – she’s more of a lone ranger who makes it up herself,” he says. “Whereas Nicole has a million cookbooks and loves to look through them for hours and hours. But if I make a tagine, I’m just going to make it up.”

Does he argue with Nicole? “Almost never.” And in previous relationships? “All the time.” Is it true that he had suffered some physical abuse from his exes and had been punched? “Yes, but if a woman is hitting me it’s hard to call it abuse. Some would call it justice,” he says. Did you hit back? “No.”

So how do you communicate it when you feel put out? “When I was young, I would either scream or sulk. Now it’s, ‘Listen – um – I think I’ll be prepared to address this topic in two days, OK? Great, let’s get on with something else.’ And then in a couple of days, you can address the topic at hand and not have it conflated with emotions.

“Everybody gets pissed off, everybody gets worked up, everybody gets tense, everybody feels… um, actually, certainly, I don’t feel unsupported, not remotely. I never bicker or get harangued, but everybody still gets upset, you know.”

You and Nicole have been together for a long time now, so it clearly works. “Yeah, we get along. You know, she’s a really fair person and… I have a lot of regard for her. I had a lot of arguing growing up, you know, and it’s not really my favourite thing to spend my time doing.”

As a young boy, Malkovich was bullied by his older brother, Danny – who for years he cited as his inspiration for his more malevolent roles – while his mother, who owned the local Benton Evening News, dealt with the anarchy in her home by retreating to the kitchen and listening to the radio. She left it to her husband to discipline their children.

Did his parents instil any guiding principles to help him when he became a parent himself? “No,” he says. “I think rights and wrongs are really hard, you know. OK, people don’t want to spank their children. I was beaten like a dog and it did nothing to me.

“It didn’t make me think my father didn’t love me and I was abused or whatever. He once said to me, after he’d told me not to do something 4,000 times, ‘When you pull the chain, the toilet flushes.’ OK. You know, he was 82nd Airborne [famously brave, pioneering paratroopers] – what’s his view of the world? I’m not like that, but I don’t disrespect him for being like that. Everyone was like that in his generation.”

So you haven’t smacked your kids? “Oh, they’ve had a couple of spankings but, you know, does it do any good? I don’t know. But I don’t think I suffered by it at all.”

Were you a strict parent? “No, it wasn’t really my job because their mother was the strict parent.” Good cop, bad cop? “No, because the really bad cop is me – but, yeah, better not to get me involved.”

What seems to have exercised Malkovich most is how the children treated their mother. “If you’re not hugely concerned about how your shared children treat your partner – if that isn’t a fundamental concern – then you shouldn’t be with that person, and they should have those same concerns for you.

“They should treat their mother and father with respect and, you know, have some interest because if you’re not interested, that’s not a relationship.” But aren’t children – for a very long time, at least – intrinsically self-absorbed? “Of course – and after that long time, and in that long time, you do have to strike the little gong occasionally to plant the idea: ‘Do you know what a relationship is?’ Everyone is a two-way street – and if you don’t want a relationship, great. But then you really won’t have one.

“For me, the principal rule of my life is that I’m never around anyone who doesn’t want to be around me.” A sigh of laughter. “It’s super-simple, and if they don’t, I beg them to take their leave as soon as possible. I mean, they have to take their leave and go.”

As if on cue, there is a knock at the door and a young woman appears to take Malkovich off to prep for tonight’s performance. He wraps his neck up in a scarf, another covetable accessory from one of his collections, and takes his leave. From serial killers to parenting skills, from fashion to friendship, the actor’s interest alights on everything we touch – and I’m left thinking how endlessly fascinating it must be, being John Malkovich.

The Times