Under the skin

Marianne Gray talks to John Malkovich about his latest film, his vanity and his first love, the stage

When I met John Malkovich to talk about Disgrace, the film of J.M. Coetzee’s novel, he hadn’t seen the film yet and was positively tremulous, if a word like ‘tremulous’ can be associated with the forceful Malkovich.

‘I am looking forward to hearing how it does because the film-makers say J.M. Coetzee likes the film,’ he tells me. ‘It is very faithful to the book but the screenplay has expanded from the novel. These are always worrying things.

‘But far more worrying is my South African accent. When we started shooting I was to have an English public school accent but then the director [Steve Jacobs, husband of the scriptwriter Anna Maria Monticelli, who adapted the book] changed it to a South African one, which meant four or five hours a day with a voice coach. I also narrate the story and things like the background history, so it had to be a perfect accent. It was hard work and quite unsettling, especially as it’s a really hard accent to catch. But, then, the book is unsettling. It’s a book that gets under your skin.’

In Disgrace, Malkovich plays the University of Cape Town academic David Lurie, who is denounced for an affair with a student and goes to live with his daughter on a farm in the Eastern Cape. Jessica Haines plays Lurie’s daughter Lucy, and Eriq Ebouaney plays Petrus, a local farmer. The novel won the 1999 Booker prize for Coetzee, who is now based in Adelaide, Australia.

‘I knew J.M. Coetzee’s work well and it seemed like a good thing to join this film. I was reading Waiting for the Barbarians when I was asked to do Disgrace.