John Malkovich

John Malkovich lent his name and his face to a film that mocks him, Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich of 1999. Jonathan Romney named what makes the decision unusual: actors dismantling their own image on screen is nothing new, but in most cases there is the safety net of fiction, whereas what was lent here is the name and the face directly. The writer relays that he urged the producers to be mean to Malkovich, and reads the decision as an inverted vanity. Romney also found the real career choices stranger than the film's invention: high-art parts in foreign languages for Raúl Ruiz and Manoel de Oliveira on one side, and on the other a careless, often lazy overstatement in commercial work like Rounders. The air of narcissism on screen he counted so marked that the film's letting him in by his own front door did not surprise him.