John Malkovich: ‘I’m 72 years old. So the end is nigh. I’m aware of that every day’

John Malkovich and Steve Buscemi form quite a pair. The former, upright in a western shirt decorated with (appropriately, as we shall see) cantering horses, speaks slowly in the style of an eccentric, but friendly, potentate. Buscemi, more informal, throws in merry asides from the corner of the room. What a way to spend an afternoon.

I last saw Buscemi about two years ago, alongside Aidan Quinn, in a staged reading of Sam Shepard’s play Ages of the Moon at the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin. They have now made it into a film.

“And Aidan directed. We’re submitting it to Sundance, and we’ll see what happens,” he bubbles.

He was then shooting the hit TV series Wednesday in Dublin. Was that fun?

“Yeah, we loved it there,” he says. “We were in Dalkey. We rented a house. Oh man, when I wasn’t working I was in the pub at four o’clock, having my Guinness. It was just the best feeling.”

We are in London principally to discuss the old friends’ work on Martin McDonagh’s incoming Wild Horse Nine. Praised at its premiere at Venice International Film Festival – where Malkovich won best actor – the serious comedy follows two CIA operatives as they visit Easter Island, almost 4,000km out in the Pacific, in the run-up to the notorious Chilean coup of 1973.

Malkovich plays the troublingly experienced Chris Carlisle. Sam Rockwell is the younger, less weathered Lee Chesterfield. Buscemi, as their station chief, frets in Santiago.

It has long been claimed that the US intelligence services were involved in the coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. McDonagh’s screenplay does nothing to undermine that theory. Indeed, Malkovich’s terminally ill character, often hinting at personal involvement in the JFK assassination, is a walking (and leaky) encyclopedia of US imperial malfeasance.

“There are things I knew well because I had written and directed an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel Libra, which is the exact same take,” he says.

He did indeed stage a version of DeLillo’s riff on Lee Harvey Oswald for Chicago’s storied Steppenwolf theatre company in 1994.

“As far as Chile goes, I do a piece called The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman, from Roberto Bolaño’s book Nazi Literature in the Americas, which is about a Chilean air-force cadet and sky-writing poet and serial killer and torturer of left-wing students under the Pinochet regime. So both are topics I was long familiar with.”

Wild Horse Nine is cracking entertainment, strong on intrigue and wise about mortality, but I do wonder what these two Americans made of a London-Irish man like McDonagh poking around in their country’s dirty laundry.

“Accurate is accurate,” Malkovich says with a fluvial laugh. “It seems a very clear-eyed view – a very likely view – of a still-contentious story. Although I don’t think it should be contentious at all.”

Is this all ancient history now? How many viewers will recall the terrible cynicism of the contemporaneous US intelligence services? Then again, maybe less has changed than we would like to believe.

“There are means and ends, and it is supposed that the means are justified by the ends,” Malkovich says. “I understand the ends. They might argue that, without such things, all of South America and all of Europe and all of Asia – the whole domino theory – would have been communist or Soviet or some kind of satellite states. Much of Europe was, of course, but some means are just not justifiable.”

Malkovich, now 72, and Buscemi, a sprightly 68, are old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination. They can certainly recall the turbulent aftermath.

“I grew up hearing these conspiracies,” Buscemi says. “I have an early memory of seeing Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV.”

Really? He can remember seeing that mysterious nightclub owner murdering the chief suspect in the JFK shooting?

“I was watching it with my mother. I couldn’t believe it. So there’s something there. I don’t know what it is. But it just seems unlikely that he acted alone. Reading the script, it was actually sort of surprising that Martin made that decision: oh yes, the CIA was involved in this.”

The world has long been puzzled by John Malkovich. Raised in southern Illinois – his father was a conservation director, his mother a newspaper proprietor – he was still in his mid-20s when, in 1976, he helped establish Steppenwolf with Joan Allen, Gary Sinise and Glenne Headly (his wife from 1982 until 1988).

Decent smallish roles came along over the next decade in films such as Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun and Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields. He scored an Oscar nomination in 1985, for Places of the Heart. But, until his impressively smooth turn in Dangerous Liaisons, from 1988, he was seen chiefly as a theatre man.

By the end of the century his peculiar screen persona – urbane extraterrestrial with a musical voice – was sufficiently understood for Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman to riff on it in the offbeat comedy Being John Malkovich.

What are his politics? I have heard that he hasn’t voted since George McGovern lost the 1972 US presidential election to Richard Nixon.

“You would be correct,” he says.

Why? The sums tell us that must also have been the first presidential election in which he voted.

“I’m realistic,” he says.

Don’t we all need to add our own tiny contribution to change?

“What is change?” he says gnomically. “These things didn’t happen under the last administration or the one before? Of course they did. They happened under Kennedy. By the way, the CIA assassinated the president from Vietnam, too – of South Vietnam.”

Malkovich is referring to the death of Ngo Dinh Diem during the 1963 coup in the Republic of Vietnam. Pay attention. This interview is increasingly taking on the quality of a late James Ellroy book.

“This is a whole other planet. Elections? I’m not a big party person,” the actor says. “I don’t look at a problem and resort to ideology as the fixer of that problem. I resort to a solution as being the way to fix a problem. That doesn’t necessarily need to be by political party A or political party B. We have a lot of problems we should concentrate on solving, not concentrate on keeping political power.”

Both Malkovich and Buscemi – an unmistakable Brooklyn boy, who worked as a New York City firefighter – came up through the world of theatre. Neither has yet deserted the medium. I wonder if that sets them apart from actors who found their feet on screen. I sense a dedication to “the word” from these actors.

“To me they aren’t even cousins,” Malkovich says of the two disciplines. “Acting in theatre is a completely different thing than acting in film. But I could care less if somebody has a theatre background. You have to have a theatre background to like it. It’s a very hard thing to enter into after you’ve done movies, because there’s a lot you won’t understand about it. To me, you either have the theatre bug or you don’t.”

We know theatre will survive. Someone will always be yelling out Shakespeare or Pinter to a gathering, however small. But cinema looks to be in the throes of another nervous breakdown. It survived telly. It survived video games. Can it now survive streaming? It is a very different business from the one Malkovich first encountered in the early 1980s.

“What’s changed is the impetus to get somebody to a movie theatre,” he says. “This really started happening long before Covid. To get someone to see something that is for adult human beings and not a fanboy thing, that’s very difficult – and made more difficult by each technological advancement and platform that arrives.

“When I was 19 you would go to see Last Tango in Paris at a theatre 170 miles away – at the university town of the University of Illinois in Champaign. That was the only time you’d ever see it. It wouldn’t exist otherwise.”

We can’t put off the sportification of art forever. Malkovich is high on the list of most distinguished living actors never to have won an Oscar. He has been nominated twice – for Places in the Heart, in 1985, and for In the Line of Fire, in 1994 – but probably did not come close on either occasion.

His time may now have arrived. Virtually every awards pundit has him neck and neck in a two-horse race with the Irish actor Andrew Scott, who is moving as Ian Charleson in Elsinore, for the best-actor statuette.

Does Malkovich concern himself with the campaign or does he leave all that to the strategists at Searchlight Pictures?

“I really let other people deal with it,” he says. “Studios like Searchlight make these kind of films. There are a few others, but not many any more. Because many of the big studios, if they exist any more, went for these tent-pole superhero thingies.”

[ Andrew Scott could be unbeatable at the Oscars. Unless this happensOpens in new window ]

If you don’t have Batman on your side, Academy Award nominations can help generate interest in your films.

“You have to get people into the theatre, and that’s the way that’s been chosen – maybe by Harvey Weinstein, maybe by others – to make it a kind of year-long campaign.

“It’s not chosen by me. I’m not a campaigner. But I told Searchlight I would do it. I’m doing it as much as I can because I go away to direct a play for two months in Japan. I do it for the film because that’s the way to get people to see the film in the cinema.”

It wasn’t always such a palaver.

“It wasn’t like that at all. No, that’s true. You got a nomination. You said, ‘Oh well. Oh cool. That’s fantastic.’ If you went, okay. If you didn’t, okay. You went and Prince blew you a kiss. You sat by Sir David Lean. I watched the elephants from Passage to India pooping in the foyer of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and being followed with shovels. It was great. It was fine!”

Malkovich recalls, back then, driving up to the auditorium with his manager, the late Phyllis Carlyle, who warned him there would be a lot of people milling about.

“I said, ‘Okay, well, let’s just go in the side door.’ I remember she was right in my face, this far from my face. She went like this…”

He clicks his fingers loudly in my direction.

“She said, ‘Honey, there’s no side door to the Oscars!’ And I was, like, ‘Okay, easy.’ But things have changed.”

Malkovich looks well in the comfortable surroundings of a luxury hotel. The voice is strong. His humour is still sharp. He manages, however, a fragile poignancy in Wild Horse Nine. Chris Carlisle has a sinister background, but we come to admire his dry fatalism in the face of his own death. There is much about mortal endings here. That must have given Malkovich pause for thought.

“I think Martin already expressed it beautifully,” Malkovich says, referring to McDonagh’s script. “He is someone at the very end of his life – actually past his due date, past his expiration date. He got six months, and he forgot that he has already had those six months.

“To me, there is not much to explore in that. Only in the sense that I’m 72 years old. So the end is nigh, and that could be today, tomorrow or in 10 years. Or one year. Or three months.”

Malkovich says this in an impressively even tone. There is nothing Beckettian in the delivery.

“I’m aware of that every day,” he says. “I have two small grandchildren. You hope you live long enough to help them, be involved in their lives, as long as you can. But apart from that I’ve had a wonderful life, and if it ends, okay.”

He smiles.

“I mean, it will definitely end. But if it ends today or tomorrow, then that’s the way it goes.”

Wild Horse Nine is in cinemas from Wednesday, November 4th