With the greatest of respect to John Malkovich, he’s just got one of those faces that make him perfectly suited to playing an eerie, unnerving, and regularly sadistic villain.
Not that he’d be affronted by such a statement when it’s served him very well on-screen, where he’s evolved into one of the most reliable and dependable character actors in the business. Sure, he’s made some bad movies along the way, as everybody does, but he can never be accused of phoning it in.
Ironically, one of the most memorable performances of his career came in a film he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about starring in, if only because the overt commerciality of working with Clint Eastwood in a high-octane action thriller flew in the face of his artistic sensibilities.
Of course, that was an obstacle he evidently overcame after going on to star in such mindless fare as Con Air, Johnny English, fantastical literary adaptation Eragon, risible comic book flick Jonah Hex, Transformers sequel Dark of the Moon, and the Zoolander sequel to name but a few. However, once upon a time, he was a man with performative principles.
“I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I can do this’. It struck me as so… popular,” he admitted to Entertainment Weekly. “You know, a kind of popular divertissement, which, don’t get me wrong. I mean, that’s what I go see. Dirty Harry. But everything I have ever done had the stench of art to it, one way or another.”
In the end, Malkovich’s role as Mitch Leary in Eastwood’s In the Line of Fire earned him his second Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, with the star on top form as the deranged assassin planning to kill the president and playing mind games with the leading man’s veteran Secret Service agent, after he’d previously failed to prevent John F. Kennedy experiencing a similar fate.
When Leary actively saves Eastwood’s Frank Horrigan from plunging to his doom following a rooftop chase, he ends up with a gun pointed in his face. Instead of cowering in fear, Malkovich improvised the moment where he puts his mouth over the barrel, which came so far out of the blue that his scene partner had to hide his face from the camera because he was in danger of being caught grinning.
“I liked it because it was kind of mocking and sort of sexual,” Malkovich said of his signature moment that he came up with on the fly and Eastwood was completely unprepared for. “It’s so kind of Jeffrey Dahmer-esque in a way.”
Director Wolfgang Petersen, however, was of an entirely different mind. “It’s so sick, it’s so weird,” he said. “Only John can come up with something like that.”