Malcolm McDowell -- A Dangerously Naughty Actor
JANUARY 21, 2008
LOS ANGELES (TNA) – He’s tap danced over the squirming body of a battered old man. He’s had sex with his sister. He’s invaded England, leaving a gruesome wake of severed heads and shredded entrails. 
Having sex with his sister, tap dancing on a squirming body of a battered old man and killing Captain Kirk are all in a day's work for actor Malcolm McDowell.
He’s maimed, murdered and tortured countless innocents. Hell, he even killed Captain Kirk.
But please, don’t take Malcolm McDowell for a monster. He only plays one in the movies.
In quote-unquote real life, the 63-year-old McDowell, whose recent credits include Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” remake, NBC’s hit show “Heroes,” and the deluxe DVD release of Bob Guccione’s “Caligula,” is “a big coward.”
“I would run, run, run from any of these guys I play,” McDowell says with a mildly menacing laugh. “But as an actor, I can’t worry about playing likable guys. If you do, you’ll never really get to the power of these uncut paths. You play sequels and special effects for the rest of your life.”
Instead, McDowell has forged a formidable career playing almost everything but likable guys.
“I’m a dangerous sort of actor, if you like,” he says. “I always go toward that danger, like a moth to the flame. What’s the point of going to the middle? There’s no point in that.”
Beneath a face of ragged silk lies an elegant visage bound and tied in truculent knots; it’s as if something behind that soulful veneer had witnessed a scathing vision, or been asked to endure barefoot too many miles paved with shattered glass.
The eyes are piercing. The shock of white hair, tossed by hell’s fury herself, is his crown. A sneer rises above McDowell’s lip even when he smiles, even when he expels an explosive laugh that sounds like shot glasses slammed to a bar top in rapid succession.
The actor has put his tools to fine use in films like Lindsey Anderson’s “If,” Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and Paul McGuigan’s “Gangster No. 1.”
“I can do mainstream,” McDowell says. “There are very few actors worth a damn who can’t do that. But mainstream is milquetoast. I have to let all of that go and get to my most primal place. That’s the kind of people I play. It’s a great trip to go on. At my best, I can rip your guts.”
Indeed, McDowell left indelible impressions as a troubled youth in landmark films like “If” and “Clockwork.” But in the 1980s, the industry shifted rather suddenly away from such aggressively auteurist films, and McDowell has in large part been forced to ply his trade in less-stellar productions. 
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Consequently, he’s often the best thing a movie has going for it. “Wing Commander,” anyone?
“I happened to be in the right place at the right time an awful lot as a young lad,” the actor concedes. “Luck plays a great part in it all. I got to play in several films that were the great roles any actor could play with some of the greatest directors who ever made films.
“But the business changed, and when it did, there were no more films like ‘If’ or ‘Clockwork’ allowed, really,” he says. “They were outlawed, it seems. There’s too much money on the line anymore. And I really like to work, even if it is sometimes crap.”
Despite efforts to distance himself from villainy, a tribute to his galvanizing turn as psychotic Alex in “Clockwork,” McDowell nevertheless found himself typecast.
“That film, it defined my career. Obviously, I’m thrilled that I did it,” he says. “But unfortunately, I think the part was so indelible in a way that it did it for me for any variety of work. They just wanted me to repeat the same damned part, which I got really pissed off at. Now, I’m not so worried about it.
“Subsequently, I began to rather resent and rather hate the film,” he says. “I sort of resented it because I felt put in a gilded cage by it. The thing was, I felt I was a very versatile actor – I can do anything – and to get stuck doing the same thing was very frustrating.”
McDowell was also “pissed,” he jokes, that director Kubrick kept the infamous, giant white dildo from “A Clockwork Orange” – one of cinema’s most famous props.
“The bastard!” McDowell says. “I wish to God I’d got it. I did keep a couple of the bowler hats.”
For a fleeting moment in the late ’70s, it seemed McDowell might have a shot at becoming a cinematic leading man. He portrayed “the good guy” in the underrated sci-fi romance, “Time After Time,” which imagines the Jack the Ripper mystery colliding with time travel.
But then McDowell opted to star in Penthouse impresario Guccione’s “Caligula,” an X-rated magnum opus that took four years to produce. Both films were released in 1979.
“It was very unfortunate timing,” McDowell says. “That year, I was in the top 10 best films and the top 10 worst films on virtually every critic’s list.”
emerikaphoto Malcolm McDowell accepts the career achievement award presented at the 12th annual Palm Beach International Film Festival awards gala, on April 21,2007.
On DVD, “Caligula” – with its graphic violence and explicit (and defiantly offbeat) sexuality, not to mention its three-hour running time – is a curiosity, glimmers of greatness apparent through the simple-minded vulgarity. It was not an easy film to make, McDowell admits.
“Gore Vidal wrote the first draft and, basically, cast me in the film,” McDowell says. “Then he had a big row with the producers and took his name off the film. I was left, really, holding Gore’s baby. I said to him, ‘Well, you’re lucky; you can take your name off of it. I can’t.’”
McDowell admits that if he had it to do over again, he might have passed on “Caligula.” Nevertheless, of the film, he maintains, “there is some greatness screaming through all the shit.”
“I’m afraid it shows you the limitations of the actor, really,” he says. “There’s not a lot you can do, except your best. That’s all there is to being an actor.”
Today, McDowell has several films in production, including video-game adaptation “Doomsday,” and an unconventional biopic of composer Antonio Vivaldi.
Rather than continuing to rail against malevolence, McDowell has “come to the conclusion that it’s better to work. People know I’m a good actor, so I don’t have to prove it every time I come to bat.”
And he sincerely hopes audiences know he’s not really a psycho. (His preferences tend toward raising his children and playing the odd game of golf.)
Where it comes to treading the boards, though, McDowell “refuses to kowtow to the audience.”
“You must never look for any kind of sympathy,” he says. “You have to show a character, especially like I so often play, with warts and all. You can look for no quarter. You can’t be afraid of being hated. Sounds so simple: Never worry about being liked.”
Which is why audiences don’t like McDowell; they love to hate him.
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