(Continued...)

Conway was able to get away with so much partially because Kubrick didn't share any of himself with the public. How much of yourself do you share with the public?

Not very much. There's a person allegedly called John Malkovich. Who is that? What does that mean? Right now, I'm making potatoes. So I know who I am and what I'm doing. But John Malkovich is who you want him to be. It's certainly not up to me. You meet people who hate your guts, who are utterly indifferent to you, who are obsessed with you, who love you, who respect you for your work, but they don't know you. They may respect what they perceive to be your talent, which other people perceive to be nonsense. And that's your part. That's public life in the public consciousness. But it's not me. It has nothing to do with me.

"I should hope that some people see through the idea that someone like me is more interesting than anybody else. I'm not"Did you agree to do Being John Malkovich partially to tweak that?
No. I agreed to do it because I thought it was a terrific script, which I had read years and years before. It never occurred to me that anybody would ever be silly enough to do it. I thought it was extremely funny, clever, prescient, and accurate about this idea that people want to be in your head, like there's something there any different from what's in their head, like there's some answer that one can distill from that life experience that can explain the purpose of life. It's absurd.

Since Conway was a man who fudged the truth, did it matter to you how close you were to the truth of his story?
No. What responsibility do you have to someone who's utterly incapable of telling the truth, or even understanding what the truth was? But I always feel a responsibility to a character who has something to say in a story worth watching. Generally in the movies, it's your chance to tell, as Faulkner says, "about the sequence of natural events and their causes which shadows every man's brow." That's your shot. It's the only one you get. In a play it's not the same, because you get that shot every night. People come in, the husband's there, he's unhappy to be there, they paid the baby sitter, to park the car costs $70, they'd rather be somewhere else. Every night it's a different crowd, and you have to attempt to compel them to become interested in the life of someone else. They may have heard the play's terrible, but they may come and love it. They may have heard it's wonderful, brilliant, and earth shattering, and they may come and sleep all the way through it and snore. But that's your job, and your privilege, too.

Have you had roles where you actually had people snoring in the audience?
Sure. I assume every role I've ever had. I don't obsess over it, or go around counting, "How many are snoring tonight? Do you think that's a rapid eye movement snore, or they just dozed off from a black Monday?" I don't analyze it, but sure.

If you're in the middle of a really emotional scene and you hear that, does that throw you? How do you get around that?

You hear it, but does it throw you? No. You get used to it. Theater is a pretty collective form, weirdly enough. It's not just you. It's also them, and what they bring to it. And there are nights I've gone to see plays and I don't think it mattered what the actors did or didn't do, because I was too tired, or had too much on my mind. I was doing a play in Chicago a few years ago and a friend said, "I'm sorry I haven't seen the play, I just can't go to the theater because I find my mind wanders." And I said, "What does that have to do with it? My mind wanders the whole time." And not just when I'm sitting there. When I'm acting, my mind wanders. That's what theater's for. To reflect. To contemplate.

Anything you watch, for certain moments you won't wander if it's very very good, but many times, even if it's very good, you will wander, and the reason you wander is because the play touches on some elements of your life—something you've lived, something you've forgotten, something you've buried, something you've shared, something you don't wanna think about. It somehow, often in a very circuitous or oblique way, hits upon something, and of course you think about that and you miss the next ten minutes of the play. But that's also what a play is for. It's not just a bunch of people going, "Oh, I completely believe everything you wonderful actors are doing on stage." It doesn't really work like that.

It took me a very long time to realize, and to allow myself, that sort of, what I perceived as flightiness or Attention Deficit Disorder.
Absolutely, and I understand why, but to me it's not at all abnormal, and you're absolutely right. It's something you have to allow yourself. Because you don't go to a play and say, "I came here to sleep and not listen to a single word the actors say." As Tom Waits said, "You're innocent when you dream," and that's a form of dream, a form of reverie. You watch this thing unfold and you start to respond, and of course you may respond emotionally. Chances are, you're going to reflect on it.

I've never heard anyone address the fact that that's alright. I think also, you've paid your $70, $90, $110 for tickets, and money for parking, so you almost feel there's an obligation to yourself to catch every second of it.
I was doing a play with a great friend of mine in London a few years ago, and a guy shouted out—in the only decent part of the play—"I hate this play!" For the next three weeks, when we got to within two minutes of that part, we were just shaking, we were laughing so hard. Because we knew exactly what he meant, and why he said it. Unfortunately, I wish he would have said it at a part of the play—which means, almost the entire rest of it—which wasn't very good. But maybe he did that because he thought, see? This play could have been good.

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