John Malkovich on The New Look and why he doesn't "look for moral guidance from artists"
The actor talks tackling Lucien Lelong in Apple TV+'s new French-fashion drama, strangers asking whether he's been told he looks like John Malkovich, and more
A lot has been said and written about John Malkovich’s distinctive parlance—that languid, deliberate way of speaking that makes you hang on his every last word, either when he’s playing a role or chatting with you through a Zoom window. For the better part of the last half century, the Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated character actor has brought that distinctive Malkovichian flair to a bevy of memorable roles: Mr. Will in Places In The Heart, Mitch Leary in In The Line Of Fire, Al Rockoff in The Killing Fields, Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, Biff Loman in Death Of A Salesman, Cyrus Grissom in Con Air, and Osbourne Cox in the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading, just to name a few. And who could forget the surreal experience of watching him play a heightened version of himself in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovitch?
A month after his 70th birthday, Malkovich shows no signs of slowing down. His latest role gives him an opportunity to deliver a softer—and perhaps more amiable—performance than the ones for which he is probably best known. In The New Look, Apple TV+’s handsome series (premiering February 14) that dramatizes the rise of the French fashion industry in the aftermath of World War II, Malkovich plays Lucien Lelong, the couturier who played a prominent role in discovering and nurturing young talent (including Christian Dior) and keeping the industry afloat in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France.
On a recent video call from Los Angeles, Malkovich chatted with The A.V. Club about Lelong’s close friendship with Dior, his own love for fashion, why he doesn’t take moral guidance from artists (or anyone other than himself for that matter), and the iconic past roles and projects that seem to follow him wherever he goes in the world.
The A.V. Club: Everyone knows Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, Cristóbal Balenciaga, and Pierre Balmain, among many other portrayed in The New Look’s iconic era of French fashion. But Lucien Lelong is almost regarded as this forgotten figure from that time of couture. How would you describe the importance of Lelong in Dior’s story, and what kind of research did you do in preparation to play him?
John Malkovich: There wasn’t so much research. There is a bit of information about Lelong, which I read, and quite a number of photos and a bit of information about his life, et cetera. But he is, as you duly noted, a figure kind of lost in history. My research for this, or anything else, usually has to do with the script, meaning my work is on the script. What am I saying and what am I doing, if it’s not clear, if it’s too expositional, if it’s too impersonal, if it’s not specific enough? That’s what I do. So I want to know what I say and what I do, [and that] the actions my character takes are clear and compelling, essentially. So most of my time is spent with that. During the research time, I was playing the lead in a French film in Brittany, so I didn’t have a lot of spare time because I was playing a huge role in French and very busy with that.
But I read every script and say, “Okay, do I know what I’m doing here? Is this accurate? Is this good? Is it sensible?” And obviously, the main part of Lelong’s character in this story is his relationship with Christian Dior, who he hired and cultivated and supported as a designer and whom he had a very close friendship with. I think he loved Christian Dior, and he loved perhaps most especially his talent and not only because of what Dior’s talent and Dior could do for the Lelong fashion house but for its own sake. I think people who can recognize and support beauty and support creation are very important people and fairly rare. They exist, thank god, but they’re not so common. And it was, if not largely through Lelong’s efforts, at least partially [because of them] that the French fashion industry survived being based in Paris and helped launch the post-war era of great success and notoriety for the industry, starting with his Théâtre de la Mode immediately following the war and then with the New Look. So he was an important figure in those senses.
AVC: So much of the dramatic tension in The New Look comes from these characters being forced to make impossible choices. Chanel chose to close her couture house but was later criticized for working with the Nazis; Lelong’s designers, including Dior, chose to make dresses for the wives of Nazi officers, in part to survive the Nazi occupation of France. The show obviously picks up toward the end of World War II, but it’s worth noting that Lelong had the wherewithal to realize that the closure of his fashion house during the war would have disastrous implications for not only himself but also the people around him. He was employing hundreds of workers who likely would not have survived financially if he had closed his business. Even though we might not necessarily see it onscreen, how would you describe Lelong’s internal struggle?
JM: I think he had great affection and even humor often with designers and with creative people in general. They were a little bit alien to him. I don’t think he was particularly creative at all, but he appreciated their abilities and sensibilities. But in a time like the French occupation, people like Lelong had to make accommodation with the situation which they found themselves in, which was either you design evening gowns for Nazi wives and mistresses or you don’t have a business and you may not have a life. Millions did forced labor. Millions went to Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz, et cetera. So he made the accommodations he had to make. He kept the Nazis at arm’s length, in some ways—for instance, their dream to move the entire French fashion industry to Berlin and have it become the German fashion industry.
But he also had his designers make gowns for Nazi wives and mistresses, and that was an accommodation he had to make. I don’t think he was happy about it. I don’t know that any French were happy about it. I know France fairly well and have spent a huge amount of time there over the years, but that’s the situation they found themselves in. The French defenses were pierced, and they were an occupied country, and that could have gone on for a month, a year, or a thousand years, and they had no idea what it would be. So they made the accommodations they had to make, and the people in the resistance did not accommodate. People make choices in times like that, and often the choices are what they feel will be the best way to survive this period for themselves, their families, their loved ones, their businesses. Most people make accommodations in those situations.