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John Malkovich has an affectionate habit of warning Nicoletta Peyran, his partner of more than three decades, about the various dangers that might befall her.
“I like to send my wife texts of disastrous things that could happen to her if she doesn’t listen,” Malkovich says over Zoom from a hotel in Boston, near his home outside the city. Folded into a couch, occasionally running a hand over his bald head, he speaks slowly, his familiar voice carrying an undercurrent of dry amusement. “This morning’s was a man being attacked by an octopus. He couldn’t get the octopus off his face.”
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At 72, after well over 100 film and TV roles alongside an acclaimed stage career, the actor is at a point when it’s natural to contemplate how things might end. He has already outlived his father and three of his siblings, all of whom died in their 50s, and has lost many friends and colleagues as well.
“Death is very much always present at my age — time really waits for no one,” Malkovich says. “But I don’t have it on my mind all the time. There’s no point in thinking about it. It won’t help anything at all. You should avoid it all you want. But the octopus is going to be on your face.”
Somehow, the whole thing feels very John Malkovich.
That same sense of existential absurdity runs through Malkovich’s newest film, “Wild Horse Nine,” which will open in theaters Nov. 6 and provides the actor with his juiciest film role in years — one that awards prognosticators are already whispering could land him his first Oscar nomination in 33 years. Malkovich, who earned his previous nominations playing an embittered blind boarder in the 1984 Depression-era drama “Places in the Heart” and a would-be presidential assassin in the 1993 thriller “In the Line of Fire,” generally doesn’t enjoy watching himself onscreen. That didn’t keep him from enjoying “Wild Horse Nine.”
“Watching myself is just a kind of black hole,” he says. “But I’m always happy to watch others and luckily I’m only one person in any given film. But yeah, I liked it.”
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Written and directed by Martin McDonagh, whose darkly comic films include “In Bruges” (2008), “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017) and “The Banshees of Inisherin” (2022), the film is set in 1973 Chile during the months leading up to the military coup that would overthrow President Salvador Allende. Malkovich plays Chris, a veteran CIA operative dying of cancer who travels with his longtime agency partner and friend, Lee (Sam Rockwell), from Santiago to Easter Island on a getaway that gradually reveals a larger purpose. His body is failing, his memory is going and, after decades spent doing terrible things in the shadows of American foreign policy, Chris is taking stock of what it all amounted to.
Asked what he shares with Chris, Malkovich starts with the differences. “I’m not addicted to heroin, I don’t smoke anymore — as much as I’d like to — and I’m not prone to killing people,” he says. “But I think I have emotional similarities to Chris. To reflect on what you’ve done and what you haven’t done is a natural phase when you near the end of your life.”
Malkovich has made something of a specialty of intelligence types over the years, including an apoplectic CIA analyst in the Coen brothers’ 2008 comedy “Burn After Reading” and a paranoid former operative in the “Red” action-comedy films. But this character is harder to get a bead on: morally compromised yet strangely lovable, a heroin user who casually divulges state secrets and muses about whether dinosaurs have souls.
It’s a role Malkovich could not have played quite this way when he was younger. His famously measured delivery has slowed, his speech at times slightly slurred, bringing a natural sense of wear and vulnerability to Chris. “I think my voice has changed,” he says. “I hear it differently now. I hear it more labored and older and less clean, which I think is just a function of age.”
