Malcolm McDowell walked into a Paris cafe not long
after his motion picture debut if.... opened and 300 people stood up and
applauded. "I looked behind me and thought, 'Who the hell are they
applauding?' Then I realized it was me!" McDowell, reflecting on his first
brush with stardom during a recent stopover in Los Angeles, flashed to the
present and his current role of a futuristic villain in the film adaptation of
the comic book Tank Girl opposite Lori Petty. "If I walk into a
restaurant the week Tank Girl opens I'll probably get bombarded with hard
rolls of bread." The veteran actor's reasoning being that his latest in a
long line of villainous roles, that began with the lead role in the classic A
Clockwork Orange and includes last year's Star Trek: Generations, is
bad in the extreme. "Kesslee [the futuristic water czar in the film] just
has a buzz up his ass. He's angry at everything and he's extremely ruthless. God
knows what kind of a childhood he had. Something very disappointing must have
happened to him. But I suppose under the circumstances set up in the premise of
the film, your heavy would have to be fairly ruthless."
Ruthless was often the condition under which the
actor worked during his six weeks on the film. "We were in the Arizona
desert and it was 130 degrees. It was like a furnace out there. It was truly
deadly. But the big kid in me took over quickly on this film," he offers.
"I was working with good people who were trying real hard to make this
comic book into a comic book movie and, for the most part, I think they
succeeded. I had so much fun on this film that if they make a sequel and they
want me back, I'm there. As long as it's not shot in Arizona," he chuckles.
Beyond the heat, McDowell's memories of the film he
shot more than a year earlier are fleeting. "I loved the scene where I stab
the guy with that water sucking thing. I also enjoyed working with Lori [Petty].
She's the focal point of the film and I think she did a fantastic job."
McDowell claims that his participation in the cutting
edge antics of Tank Girl should come as no surprise. "This is the
type of film that appeals to me. If it's off center I'm there. All you have to
do is look at my career to see that. If this had been a more mainstream action
film I wouldn't have taken it. For me there never would have been a point."
In fact the actor is so set in his off center ways that
he literally had to be pushed by his agent into taking the role of Kirk killer
Dr. Soran in Star Trek: Generations.
"My agent felt very strongly that I should do it.
I hadn't done a mainstream film in a while. But my agent insisted that while
it's all very well to go off and do all the weird little films that I do but
that, every once in a while, you have to be in a hit movie. I resisted it at
first but I finally did it and I'm glad that I did because while it may have
been Science Fiction it was a very character-driven role. My character in Star
Trek is not really evil," he continues. "He's just an obsessed
scientist who finds himself in a misplaced time and place. And he was fun to
play. In fact my whole time on Star Trek was a lot of fun. Oh, the two weeks of
all the action stuff, the running and jumping, went on a little longer than I
would have liked but I was working with friends so I really enjoyed it. I've
been an acquaintance of Patrick Stewart's for 30 years. I was a little hesitant
about working with William Shatner because, like everybody else, I had heard all
those stories. But I found that the baggage he drags around was totally untrue.
He was not pompous in any way and he was very nice to me."
McDowell chuckles at the fact that the result of
killing off Kirk in the film resulted in his being the recipient of death
threats along the computer highway by some Star Trek fanatics who were upset
that he had killed Kirk. "It was just some false bravado. I didn't take it
seriously. In fact the only ones who did were the executives at Paramount who
offered me bodyguards."
McDowell, born in England, began acting in theatre as
part of the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing in such productions
as Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Look Back in Anger. His massive
list of film credits include A Clockwork Orange, Time After Time, O
Lucky Man! and the film he admits, "I probably should not have
done", the infamous Caligula. But he is quick to look back fondly at the
film that broke him in a very big way, if...
"I didn't realize that things couldn't get
much bigger for me than they did when if... was released," recalls
the actor. "I couldn't believe that any film would be more important to me
than that. I couldn't imagine things getting any better for me. I would go down
to the theatres in London and there would be lines a half-mile long of people
waiting to see a movie I was in. People would see me on the streets and freak
out. I had gone from being this completely anonymous rep actor to somebody who
was this symbol for something very important to a lot people. I literally
thought that if... was going be the pinnacle of my career," he
continues in genuine wonderment. "But then Clockwork Orange came
along and made if... look like a minor success by comparison."
McDowell's memories of a lot of really intense work.
"Stanley [Kubrick] was a real taskmaster. He
wanted things a certain way. Everything from the violence to the close-ups were
shot every conceivable way. It was easily one of the hardest films I worked on
but you couldn't fault Stanley because the finished production is something of a
classic."
The actor laughingly recalls that he was one of the
rare people to get Kubrick, notorious recluse, to leave his home to meet with
him and, he howls, it once ended with some hilarious results.
"We were having some conferences at my home in
London and Stanley came up to me at one point and asked where the toilet was. I
told him it was downstairs. We went about our business and then, about a
half-hour later, we realized that Stanley was nowhere to be seen. We started
yelling for him and then I heard a muffled yell coming from the bathroom. I went
downstairs and I heard this yelling and banging. I had forgotten to tell Stanley
that you had to push the handle rather than twist it to open the bathroom door
and Stanley had locked himself in and was twisting and twisting. It was one of
the funniest things I had ever seen."
McDowell admits that, career wise, "I'm enjoying
it all right now and I'm not taking any of it too seriously I suppose acting in
films is a bigger responsibility than it used to be. But my attitude these days
is to do your best work and walk away. I've always tried to enjoy the parts I
do, even some of the more ridiculous ones."
And McDowell, well aware that everything he's done has
not smelled like a rose, jumps at the chance to explore a couple of his more
notorious turkeys. First up, The Passage opposite Anthony Quinn and James
Mason.
"I played this real nasty Nazi who was chasing
these people across the Pyranees. We all knew real early on that the movie was
not going to be any great work of art and so I was determined to have some fun
with it. My attitude was that if I was going to play a Nazi, I was going to take
it totally over the top and do it right. I ended up playing the character like a
pantomime queen. What I was doing was so far out that James Mason turned to me
one day and said, 'That's wonderful dear boy, but are you in our film? You seem
to be doing something different from the rest of us'," laughs McDowell.
Another blight on the actor's otherwise sterling career was
the year McDowell spent on Caligula. "A year?" roars the actor at the
memory. "It felt more like 20 years. It was an extraordinary experience
but, in hindsight, it was probably something I should not have done. I got to
work with John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole. It was pretty raunchy and a lot of
people were offended by it. I'm not ashamed of having done it but, if I had the
decision to make again, I probably would have said no. But I'd like to think I
gave a pretty creditable performance with material that was pretty difficult to
get through."
While McDowell's career also contains such mainstream
gems as Look Back in Anger, Voyage of the Damned and O Lucky
Man!, such genre projects as Cat People, Moon 44 and Class
of 1999 also dot the actor's landscape.
"I haven't always made what turned out to be the
wisest choices," concedes McDowell. "But that's what happens when
you're constantly drawn to things that are somewhat off center. Whether or not
the movies have turned out well is the chance one takes. But there was always
something interesting in all the projects I've done that has drawn me to them in
the first place."
And while the actor, who recently starred in the CD-ROM
interactive game Wing Commander III, says he's always looking for the
character driven, cerebral parts, movies like Tank Girl, which he
explains "is a film that you don't ask too many questions of" always
seem to come his way.
"I always seem to end up with these fantasy things
which is kind of weird," concludes McDowell. "But after I did A
Clockwork Orange, I guess my card was sort of marked. There were only about
25 minutes of that film that could be considered Science Fiction in nature. But
those images, the Droogs, the eyeliner, the bowler hat. For better or worse
those images and the overall strength of A Clockwork Orange just hooked
me into this whole fantasy thing. And there was nothing I could easily do to
stop it."
© Starburst, July 1995
Archived 2001-08 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net