John Malkovich ‘couldn’t believe’ he got the role that might just bring his first Oscar

John Malkovich had just one reservation about going to the middle of the Pacific to make Wild Horse Nine: he didn’t like the fact he would have to be away from his granddaughters for two or three months. He and his partner of 30 years, Nicoletta Peyran, have two granddaughters and a house in Massachusetts full of picture books and plastic animals.

It isn’t the image most people have of this singular actor, with his extravagantly eccentric clothes and that faint air of menace he has brought ready-made to a variety of film villains, but Malkovich says this is how he spends most of his time. Walking around the neighbourhood, barking on his girls’ command when they see one of the local dogs, comes easily to him. “For me, it’s nothing,” he told GQ. “To be an actor, part of you has to remain as a child.”

I meet Malkovich at the Venice Film Festival, where Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine is rapturously received and Malkovich’s performance, which wins him the festival’s Volpi Cup for best actor, sparks immediate Oscar talk. Malkovich plays a CIA agent called Chris Carlisle who can say with blasé professional pride that he has assassinated 168 people – although none of them while eating, as Malkovich notes wryly – but is now ravaged by cancer and by his addiction to the morphine that provides his only respite from pain.

Chris is a cauldron of secrets and unspoken feelings, which may or may not include guilt. Even in his weakened state, his voice wavering into breathlessness, he feels dangerous. Chris is as far as can be imagined from a woofing grandpa.

The year is 1973. Stationed in Chile, where his employers have already scheduled the assassination of the sitting president, Salvador Allende, Chris is ostensibly taking a week’s holiday on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), 3700 kilometres from the Chilean coast. With him is his protege and only friend Lee Chesterfield, played with winning swagger by Sam Rockwell.

In fact, he has asked Lee to shoot him while they’re away, putting a clean end to his dwindling life. What he doesn’t know – although, given his character, he may well know – is that his managing bureau chief, a snake in the grass called MJ (Steve Buscemi), has ordered Lee to dispatch him. He talks too much. The old killer has become a liability.

That’s the bones of it, but it is the business around this trip that is so entertaining: the banter between the two men, Lee’s calls home to his belligerent wife Marge (Parker Posey), their encounters with the young leftist students who take Chris to a karaoke bar, or our brief sighting of Chris’ brother, Jim (Tom Waits), who lives in a cabin in the Arizona desert and doesn’t want to be bothered.

There is also the unavoidable majesty of the island itself with, as Chris keeps saying, “the heads”. And the endemic wild horses, which take on a ghostly dimension as Chris inches towards death. Malkovich describes it as a perfect screenplay. “I couldn’t believe I got sent it,” he says. At the age of 73, it is also his moment. He has been nominated for an Oscar twice before – for Best Supporting Actor in Places in the Heart (1984) and In the Line of Fire (1993) – but never as Best Actor. A nomination for this film seems a certainty.

Malkovich’s exquisite outfits – today, he is wearing a heavily embroidered coat, trousers and matching slippers, an outfit ready for anything an Armenian folkloric festival might demand of him – do not suggest a man of the outdoors, but he loved being on Rapa Nui. “I loved it! It’s very green, verdant, volcanic, it’s beautiful, it’s quiet, it’s a good place to work, a good place for introspection and isolation, in a way. But isolation in a reflective way, not in a negative sense, not like being in some kind of isolation tank.”

The remoteness of this windswept island throws the existential loneliness of the characters into sharp relief. That feels very modern, says Malkovich, even though it takes place, very specifically, more than 50 years ago. “They’re not distracted by their phones or their computers. They can’t even be distracted by life itself. They’re alone.” In our age of endless distraction, we are plagued by that kind of loneliness more than ever. Audiences will sense that, Malkovich said in an interview before the film’s premiere.

“This material, I believe, causes a big wave, and you ride that wave where it’s going, through comedy, through drama, through tragedy. That’s what actors do. The collision between the public and the material is caused by a recognition in their lives.”

He is quite certain that our own loneliness can be shored home to social media. “It’s a well-known fact that anti-social media leads to mental illness, incredible feelings of loneliness, inadequacy, et cetera, et cetera,” says Malkovich. He used to say he never went near it: “I don’t see the value. I’m doing things.” Today he accepts that doing things means connecting with people. So does family. “If our granddaughter, who is 10 months old, calls us and we don’t answer, when you get her she looks like Kim Jong-il, ready to dispatch you. She’s not happy.”

And, of course, he does what’s expected. He stays in touch and goes where he’s called. It’s a sea-change from the lives of his parents’ generation. “I’m from a little town in Illinois,” he says. “Why would I be in Venice? Why would I be in Sydney? Why would I be in Shanghai? It makes no sense. You grew up with your family around you and you died with your family around you – for generations. Only the characters in Greek tragedies did this kind of movement and travel.”

Malkovich’s name is Croatian, but his family was well entrenched in the coal town of Benton; his father was state conservationist and published a magazine called Outdoor Illinois, while his mother had inherited the local newspaper. He was one of five siblings. As a kid, his ambition was to play baseball. What drove him to be the one who left town? To become that Greek hero?

“You know, that’s a great question. I never really asked myself,” he says. “The first film I developed was called The Accidental Tourist and that’s kind of how I think about life: that it’s all been an accident. I had a girlfriend who was in theatre. I started watching the rehearsals. I started doing it. Then some kids wanted to start a theatre group. Ten idiots, woo-woo. That’s 50 years ago.” That group was Steppenwolf, the legendary theatre troupe based in Chicago and convened by Gary Sinise. Their first landmark production was Sam Shepard’s True West, which they took to New York. It took the city by storm and became Malkovich’s launching pad.

“Some of us went to the four corners of the earth and we’re still going there,” he muses. “But why? I wouldn’t have the slightest clue, really. Why me? Why not the person we can hear walking in the hallway?” An anxious publicist is prowling, trying to move me along, but Malkovich is now in full, languid flow. “Things happened. I kind of went along with it. Within those things, I found certain interests and certain colleagues that provided a kind of stability and continuum.”

He had specific mentors? “It started with my family. My mother, even though she was an agoraphobe. I think I was raised to be curious about the world, not to be frightened by it, not to be terrified by it, not to think it was a terrible, horrible place of bleakness and continued darkness. That there were really beautiful things in the world worth seeing.” He still believes in that world: a world of beautiful things.

“But if anyone asked ‘Did you ever think you’d direct three plays in Paris?‘, you’d have to have been insane to think that. Absolutely barking mad, but so what? And then it happened. And if somebody said ‘yeah, sure, you’ll do an opera with Cecilia Bartoli’ – why not? Except I’m not an opera singer, so why would that happen? I was lucky, I think. I met people who introduced me to people.” He reels off a few names of collaborators from the film world: Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, Raul Ruiz, Jane Campion, Stephen Frears. “I was always available for new experiences. And I didn’t have a plan.”

He is more of an instigator now, the film roles supporting the theatre work that is his greatest love. “If I want to direct Leopoldstadt in Latvia, then I direct Leopoldstadt in Latvia. If I want to direct Arms and the Man in Bulgaria, then I direct Arms and the Man in Bulgaria.” Not that this settled schedule lacks edge, however. George Bernard Shaw’s anti-militarist comedy caused a ruckus in Sofia, because its setting during the Serbo-Bulgarian war of 1885 was interpreted by certain people as mockery.

“Unfortunately, the production caused riots,” Malkovich says calmly. “It was absolute nonsense, really. It was a lovely production, inoffensive in every way, but it was some kind of anti-Euro, anti-foreigner thing that took the shape of ‘Malkovich Go Home’.” An inside job, he calls it. “But I met all kinds of people on the street who said: ‘oh God, we’re so sorry’. A guy drove past and put something in my hand: it was a switchblade. And he said: ‘you may need this’. I said: ‘I may use this.’”

Malkovich has never declared any kind of political allegiance, apart from saying he dislikes any ideology, but he is by no means oblivious. Long before making Wild Horse Nine, he had delved into the CIA’s covert operations, when he adapted Don DeLillo’s novel Libra – about the life and times of Lee Harvey Oswald, charged with the murder of President John F. Kennedy. “I made a deep, profound study of the Warren Report and every kind of conspiracy theory,” he tells me. “I agree with Don, who wrote in his novel that these were the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.”

He has also directed a reading with musical accompaniment of The Infamous Ramirez Hoffmann by Chilean writer Roberto Bolano, about a fictional poet who served the Pinochet regime in Chile by murdering and torturing dissident students. “There were events that reverberated around the entire world and for a few generations now. There are scars and wounds that don’t heal,” says Malkovich. “And I think it will go on that way for years, as certain current events will also resound for decades. That’s how history works. It’s pretty terrible.”

Had he ever met anyone like Chris? A long pause. “No. Not really.” Nobody he thought was from the CIA? “Oh, well, in that sense, I have one or two people I’ve met people who I’m sure are in the CIA, but have a whole other life, but they’re kind of perfectly charming and cultivated and I’m always very happy to see them. And I doubt they’re assassins.” And yet, how could you tell? Who would pick John Malkovich – the ruthless seducer of Dangerous Liaisons, the psycho-killer from Con Air – as a man who spends whole days playing with plastic animals? The world is, indeed, full of beautiful things.

Wild Horse Nine opens on November 5.

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