“Our then business manager had invested pretty much everything we’d ever made with somebody called Bernie Madoff.” Madoff defrauded thousands of investors out of an estimated $64.8bn and was given a 150-year jail sentence in 2009. In December 2008, Malkovich lost his life savings. “It would require a change in the way we live. “I certainly never had a plan.” Would it bother him if he never got another job offer? “No!” He sounds positively enthused. Malkovich is 66, into his fifth decade in the film industry, and insists he has been winging it the whole time. But, oddly, the more he talks about loss, in that hushed, melancholy voice, the more I begin to suspect he is one of life’s unlikely optimists. All sorts of loss, from weight (shedding 32kg – 5st – as a teenager) to hair to money – and even three siblings in their 50s. Again, he doesn’t mention it, until I ask at the end of our call. Today, he is supposed to be promoting Space Force, a Netflix comedy. He didn’t mention the film once in our hour-long meeting. I first interviewed him 27 years ago when he had just made In the Line of Fire – a thriller in which he plays an assassin determined to kill the president (and which is one of his classics). In fact, he gives the impression that he would be happy if you had seen none. Fortunately, Malkovich doesn’t expect you to have seen all his work. Finally, there is his real love – theatre. So then there are his more esoteric projects: a photography exhibition by Sandro Miller in which Malkovich recreated iconic portraits, including Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother collaborations with classical musicians in which he reads out venomous critiques of the great composers. For starters, there are his films, about 90 of them – mainstream, indie, European arthouse, schlocky, literary, self-referential, lots of stinkers and a few classics. Y ou could spend a lifetime preparing to interview John Malkovich.

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