The actor who reminds John Malkovich of a Tom Waits song: “She’s a very haunted girl”
John Malkovich is about as unconventional as you get in Hollywood.
His screen presence is too kooky to be entirely sinister and too sinister to be entirely kooky, and when you watch him, it’s hard to decide whether he’s the villain or the comic relief, which is why he tends to damn-near always be the most memorable thing about every movie he’s in.
All of it has worked pretty well for him, since he has collaborated with some of the best in the business, and he’s never compromised on his weirdness, and has even leaned into it over the years, because how else could you explain that accent in Rounders or the existence of a film like Being John Malkovich?
As far as his colleagues are concerned, Malkovich is the real deal, especially Dustin Hoffman, who was so mesmerised by him during his audition for Death of a Salesman that, years later, he claimed the moment was “fixed in my synapses”, and Matt Damon who described working with him as “one of my favourite things that’s ever happened on a movie.”
So, we can accept at face value that working with Malkovich is a one-of-a-kind experience, but the actor has also found himself in awe of a co-star, and it wasn’t an Oscar winner who bowled him over, so strap yourself in for the revelation because, by modern-day standards, some of his comments are pretty icky, but the payoff is a Tom Waits lyric, so it might be worth it.
In a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone, Malkovich appeared to be head-over-heels in love with Uma Thurman, who was 18 years old at the time and nearly two decades his junior, after they had just starred together in Dangerous Liaisons, in which he played the lecherous Vicomte de Valmont, who seduces the virginal Cécile de Volanges in a series of torrid conquests.
“She’s an extraordinary girl, a particular favourite,” Malkovich enthused. “She has this Jayne Mansfield body and a horrifyingly great brain.”
He revealed that they spoke about the cosmos while on set, and he insisted that his fascination with her really had nothing to do with how beautiful she was. The writer of the article noted that Malkovich had left a voicemail on Thurman’s phone saying, “I just wanted to hear your voice.”
As if all that weren’t creepy enough, the Con Air actor decided to get downright poetic. “She’s a very haunted girl, much too bright for her age,” he said, adding, “She sometimes reminds me of a line from a Tom Waits song – ‘It’s a battered old suitcase in a hotel someplace in a wound that will never heal.’”
It’s a curious association, since the lyric comes from the song ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)’ from the 1976 album Small Change, and it charts the quietly devastating life of a drifter who is living on the edge, succumbing to loneliness and alcohol. According to Waits himself, it was written about an acquaintance of his “who lived in Denver and died in jail.”
How that relates to Thurman is unclear, though the lyric about the suitcase and the wound that will never heal could possibly be translated to Malkovich’s belief that the 18-year-old was an old soul who was doomed to never find what she was seeking. Whatever the association, it’s clear that he was revealing a lot more about himself in that interview than he was about Thurman.
