John Malkovich: 'I don't live in the past'

It's not every day that you walk into a hotel room and find a two-time Oscar-nominated actor sprawled elegantly on the bed (in a suit and tie no less).

But then John Malkovich is not like most actors. He's built a career on playing all manner of weirdo, and he's not without his own peculiarities. Ask his friends. Gary Sinise, of CSI:NY fame, describes him as "eccentric in every way imaginable, personality, fashion, humour. He's a unique kind of guy". Tilda Swinton, who just worked with him on the Coen brothers film Burn After Reading, calls him "magnificently strange".

Malkovich was in Toronto recently for the film festival where he had three films screening in various sections. There was the Coens' wacky espionage caper in which he plays an angry ex-CIA analyst who ends up cuckolded by his wife (Swinton) and her lover (George Clooney) and then blackmailed by two witless souls (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand). In Disgrace, directed by Steve Jacobs, he's a professor who ruins his career when he has an affair with a student in post-apartheid South Africa. In Afterwards (Gilles Bourdos), he's a doctor who can predict when people will die.

Toronto is an important festival. It's considered to be a springboard to the Oscars, and Malkovich's performance in the Coens' frivolous farce is already generating a buzz. It would make Malkovich's third nomination. A big deal by most actors' standards. (He was previously nominated for Place s in the Heart in 1984 and In the Line of Fire in 1993).

"I couldn't care less," he says in that gentle, quiet voice of his. Malkovich has been accused of arrogance in the past, and it's easy to see why. He's so self-possessed and assured it's unnerving at times. Nothing, it seems, can penetrate that cool, calm exterior, not even an Oscar.

"If people hate the films, well, too bad, but if they like them, I'm glad," he says. "Winning an award is not something I think about. I mean, I will hopefully do my fourth film with Raoul Ruiz this year [Love and Virtue, an epic based on the legends of the medieval The Song of Roland; the other three were the equally arthouse Time Regained, Klimt and Savage Souls] and if it doesn't make $70m on the first weekend I won't be among those who are shocked. Although I would have thought a film about Emperor Charlemagne would be a natural at the box office," he says dryly.

Charlie Kaufman's film Being John Malkovich made it painfully clear that getting inside the head of the man once referred to as "the Magic Johnson of theatre" is no easy feat. But why make a film if he doesn't think it will do well? "The basic rule is that you do something because you think it could be good," he says. "Some of them are and some of them aren't."

That basically encapsulates the 54-year-old's erratic career to date. The good include The Killing Fields (his debut performance), Dangerous Liaisons and Ripley's Game, based on Patricia Highsmith's novel. The not so good (of which there are just as many) include Mary Reilly, The Knockaround Guys, and the very peculiar The Convent.

"With some of them it was always going to be highly unlikely to think that there would be some kind of success. But I did what was of interest to me," he says. "As an actor you only choose from among that from which you have been chosen for. There's a lot of things I don't get offered. It's not a criticism, it's simply a fact. Nobody says to me, 'will you be in a Will Ferrell film?' I would if they asked, but they don't, so I'm not."

Malkovich has a Zen-like approach to life and his career. He admits he "can't stand" watching his films, but he certainly doesn't regret making any of them. "I don't live in the past in that way, because you can't go back," he says. "When I was younger I did have more regret, more guilt, more shame. I mean, I'm a father [he has two children; Amandine – or Beauty as he calls her – is 18 and Lowey – Little Man – is 16]. You always feel like there is one thing more that you should have said or should have done or been. When they get to be teenagers you realise that there is nothing you could have done," he says, laughing.

Born in the small town of Benton, Illinois, Malkovich, one of five children, describes his upbringing as "pleasant" and "uneventful". He grew up in a family of journalists. His father ran a conservation magazine, his mother, brother and grandparents the local newspaper. Malkovich studied ecology at Eastern Illinois University, until he discovered acting. He switched to Illinois State for their theatre programme. That's where he met Sinise, one of the co-founders of the famous Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Malkovich joined them in 1976. Today it is one of the pre-eminent theatrical companies in the US.

His first love is and always will be the theatre. When you ask him where he thinks he's done his best work, he says "the stage, unequivocally". Do the Oscar nominations mean anything at all? "Sure, but for me movies are like a quick sketch, a doodle. Theatre is like a painting. It involves more craft. It has more depth, more texture and it changes every single night because it's a living, breathing organism. It commands my respect that much more."

For many years Malkovich was unfaithful to his first love. When his children were small (and growing up in France, where he lived) he strayed. "I couldn't be a good father and a theatre actor," he says. "I would have been absent too often." So he primarily made films. Now his children are teenagers, and he hopes to spend less time with his mistress and more time with his true love. He's already started. Last year he directed Zach Helm's Good Canary in Paris. Next year he'll return to Paris to direct a "new translation" of Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses. "It's slightly altered," he says, smiling. "He's sort of given me permission to try it and if he approves it, then it'll happen."

And films? Where do they fit in? He lapses into a silence. For a long time Malkovich wasn't offered a lot of American films, partly because he was living in France with his partner Nicoletta Peyran. (They met on Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky in 1990.) "I became that guy that you hear people trying to place. He used to act in movies once. What was his name?" Didn't Kaufman's film bring him to the attention of a new generation of filmgoers? "Perhaps," he shrugs. The family moved to Boston in 2003. (He chose Chicago. Peyran preferred Boston.) Since then the American offers have increased. Last year there was Beowulf and The Great Buck Howard. Coming up is The Changeling, which reunites him with Clint Eastwood, with whom he worked on In the Line of Fire. "A prince among thieves," he says. For now, there's the Coens' movie.

Malkovich has worked with some of the great directors; Antonioni and Manuel de Oliveira to name two. How do the Coens compare? "They're obviously very clever. There isn't a lot that gets by there. There are very few aces really with the Coen brothers, let's face it. That is not the case with a lot of other people. A lot of directors don't have the slightest idea how to direct something. Some of them wouldn't know the first thing about a frame. But the Coens are princes, because they're smart, they're clever, they make terrific films and they're very easy to be around."

It's hard to imagine Malkovich liking a Coen brothers' film, particularly the more idiotic ones. Malkovich is fiercely intelligent and cultured. He speaks several languages and you imagine his taste running to more highbrow fare like that of Fellini or Tarkovsky perhaps. "Nobody is happier than I am watching Tropic Thunder [the recently released big-budget spoof directed by Ben Stiller]," he says. "I couldn't care less what kind of movie it is. I'm much too eclectic for that. I will like The Lives of Others equally to Porkies II if they achieve what they set out to do. And one sets out to make people laugh, while the other one sets out to tell us something about how we should live. If they achieve that I'm very happy."

Besides acting and directing, Malkovich also producers. He set up his Mr Mudd productions in 1998, which produced Ghost World, The Libertine and Art School Confidential among others. "I make my living as an actor, I lose my living as a producer," he laughs. Then why do it? "Because I like it, and there can be a million reasons why I do a movie. I did Ghost World because I liked it. I did The Dancer Upstairs [which marked his feature film directorial debut] because I liked it. Some are venal and some are not so venal. But I'll keep at it."

You wonder if Malkovich is content with his achievements to date. He thinks about that for a few minutes. "You know if I walk down the street and people say I loved that play of yadda, yadda, yadda, I don't remember it and what difference does it make anyway?"

So how does he see the next few years unfolding? "I don't know," he says. "That's something I don't control, meaning I am either offered things or I'm not. Certainly I have still a lot of things I would like to do, and if somebody will give me the chance to do something I will and if they don't I won't."

'Burn After Reading' opens today