John Malkovich, a world-weary CIA man in 'Wild Horse Nine,' prefers life on the road

NEW YORK (AP) — In Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine,” John Malkovich plays an itinerant CIA officer, Chris, weary from his travels. But Chris has got nothing on Malkovich's miles.

Over his 50-year career, Malkovich has performed live in 47 countries, by his count. He’s played a serial killer in Hamburg. He’s directed “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” in Paris. He’s done George Bernard Shaw in Bulgaria.

“It’s probably not by an accident that the first film I ever developed was called ‘The Accidental Tourist,’” Malkovich says, chuckling. “It just kind of happened and I went along with it. It’s a big world.”

Malkovich is best known for his screen credits, including “Empire of the Sun,” “Of Mice and Men,” “In the Line of Fire,” “Being John Malkovich” and the new “Wild Horse Nine,” in which he plays a dying CIA man on Easter Island who, after a lifetime of toppling governments and carrying out assassinations, is increasingly eager to spill the beans. The performance — mordant, droll, elegiac — is a big-screen apogee for Malkovich. He's favored to win what would be his first Academy Award.

But if Malkovich is experiencing a moment of public celebration at 72, it’s also a reminder that he has, if not eschewed the spotlight, seldom sat still long enough for it to linger. Instead, Malkovich has preferred an ever-moving, endlessly curious life on the road.

“I’m a worker, and this isn’t part of my work,” Malkovich said in an interview on his way through New York. “I rarely go to openings. I rarely see a film I’m in. I’m rarely asked to promote because I’m already gone.”

Malkovich was momentarily stationary on a recent, bright fall day. He wore a hat, not unlike his character’s in “Wild Horse Nine,” to shield his bald head from the hotel air conditioning. The threat of getting sick was his biggest worry. Days earlier, he had performed spoken word in Mexico City. By the time “Wild Horse Nine” arrives in theaters Friday, Malkovich will be in Japan, directing a play.

“I’ll go to Japan — I don’t speak a word of it. I directed ‘Leopoldstadt' in Latvian, don’t speak a word of Latvian. Well, I had five or six words, the main one was ‘cinnamon roll,’ which is two words,” Malkovich says. “I’ve just been constantly learning.”

Those experiences have taught Malkovich that countries may differ, but audiences are generally the same. They come to be compelled or amused. Mostly, he says, they come for catharsis. And he keeps giving it to them.

“You find yourself in Monte Carlo or Oklahoma City or Salé or Porto Alegre,” Malkovich says. “It’s 4 a.m., you’re up. It’s 5 a.m., you’re already in a car. This is thousands of mornings for me. I could even say maybe it’s most mornings. You don’t know anyone and you may never be back. This is my life on the road.”

Malkovich has watched some of his contemporaries lose their enthusiasm for acting, but he considers himself more interested now than when he was in his 20s. In the late 1970s, Malkovich was a charter member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. Performances in plays like “True West” and “Death of a Salesman” made him one of his generation's most thrilling stage performers.

“You should learn something every day,” he says. “Somebody asked me to do a fashion line. I’ve done 24 collections. What do I know about it? (Expletive) all. The point is to learn about it, it seems to me.”

Over the last two decades, Malkovich has increasingly worked with classical music performers in hybrid stage shows that pair spoken word with orchestras and chamber ensembles. In one, the satirical “The Music Critic,” violinist Aleksey Igudesman performs classical masterworks alongside Malkovich’s deadpan readings of old, now-comical critical pans.

“I work in classical music a lot because I can help sell tickets,” Malkovich says. “OK, and what do I get from that? I get the pleasure of being on stage with unbelievably beautiful music performed by unbelievably well-trained and gifted musicians.”

Malkovich’s travels have sometimes run into local politics. Earlier this year, he pulled out of performing “The Music Critic” in Tel Aviv, Israel, after a press release falsely attributed quotes to him. Two years ago in Bulgaria, a Malkovich-directed production of Shaw’s anti-war comedy “Arms and the Man” became a target of far-right nationalist protesters who physically assaulted theatergoers.

“I think that’s all unfortunate and pretty goofy, all in all, and had nothing to do with the play,” he says.

Being on the road so often has inevitably meant sacrifice. Unable to find time in his international schedule, Malkovich twice before turned down McDonagh. But McDonagh, the playwright-turned-filmmaker of “In Bruges” and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” persisted — even if Malkovich’s intellect was intimidating.

“I was scared the first time I had a Zoom with him,” McDonagh says. “But I knew that in the silent moments you’d see acres of sorrow and regret when he’s seemingly not doing anything — when he’s just looking out of a window or listening to a Dictaphone or smoking a cigarette. That, I think, is the heart of the movie.”

When he read McDonagh’s script, which touches on CIA involvement in both John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the military coup in Chile , Malkovich found it paralleled some of his previous work: a stage adaptation of Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and a piece based on Roberto Bolaño’s “Nazi Literature in the Americas.”

“Those are the two bookends of this: Two huge national, international traumas that happened in the TV age and which are the kind of magnets that keep crushing these characters and their movement through life,” he says.

Malkovich could have easily drifted more toward movie-star iconography. It wouldn’t have been hard for him, after “Being John Malkovich,” to trade more directly on his unique screen presence and his halting, idiosyncratic line deliveries. It’s a path that Malkovich knowingly avoided, preferring to shape his own artistic life than wait around for a good part to show up.

At the Telluride Film Festival premiere of “Wild Horse Nine,” Malkovich ran into the producer Kathleen Kennedy, who produced 1987’s “Empire of the Sun,” directed by Steven Spielberg. He hadn’t seen her since.

“I probably haven’t seen Steven in all those years. OK, I had a different life. I went a different way. But without any sort of malice or distaste,” says Malkovich. “It’s just that a lot of things interested me and I pursued most of them with some degree of vigor and interest, as I do everything.”

“I always accepted in my life that doing what you want, there’s a price to that. And that’s fine. I never minded that price at all,” Malkovich says. “I’ve done exactly what I wanted, more or less.”

Malkovich grew up in a rural coal-mining town in Illinois. The big claim to fame, he says, is its proximity to a maximum-security prison. This month, like many months, he’ll be on the other side of the globe, directing a troupe of actors in a language he doesn’t understand.

“I often to put my youngest granddaughter to sleep by singing ‘One Too Many Mornings’ by Bob Dylan,” Malkovich says. “One too many mornings / And a thousand miles behind.”