Malcolm McDowell interview

Malcolm McDowell doesn’t always play the bad guy or exclusively star in horror movies, and in fact if you gazed at his over 100 credits you’d notice an equal number of regular roles as villainous ones. For every appearance in a Silent Hill or Halloween movie McDowell has also played a principal in movies like Easy A or done a voice-over in an animated film like Bolt.

“We just got renewed for a third season,” McDowell tells Free Press Houston in an exclusive interview regarding the series Franklin & Bash. “I like being on that show because it’s a fun comedy and a great role.”

In his newest movie Silent Night, McDowell plays a sheriff in a town plagued by more than one psycho Santa Claus. Silent Night opens today theatrically at the AMC Gulf Pointe 30, and debuts on disc on December 4. “There’s just something scary about Santa to begin with,” McDowell states. “God knows what kind of sex overtures are imbedded in a character that has young kids sitting on their lap telling them their secret gift wishes. I don’t want my kids seeing Santa,” McDowell laughs and then veers the subject around. “Toys and joy equal Santa, and to have a movie where Santa is a serial killer elevates the material into black comedy with guaranteed screams and laughs.”

McDowell’s resume shows over a half-dozen films set for release in 2025, including Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral. A synopsis for Mind’s Eye promises the collapse of space and time. “Which one?” McDowell asks, “They’re always changing the titles.” Another title Monster Butler refers to a movie about famous Scottish serial killer Roy Fontaine. “Actually we were four days away from shooting and the financing fell through,” laments McDowell. “We want to get that production back up and running. It’s such a unique story; you have a stately home and a butler whom everyone likes, and he’s also a con man and a killer. Fontaine is quite famous in Scotland. He led a totally normal life and then something just flipped when he was in his mid-50s.”

McDowell describes the process of acting as “fabulous when you’re with the right actors.” He especially likes being on the edge of the craft, such as working with directors like Robert Altman who encourage improvisation on the set. “With Altman you’ll have three actors and ten microphones. There are great actors who can’t do improv.”

McDowell has lived in California for quite some time, residing in the shadow of a place called Meditation Mountain in Ventura County. This particular peak was used for a matte shot in the 1937 Frank Capra film Lost Horizons. The conversation swings to how Capra cut the first two-reels of that classic film after a test screening. “What’s that about twenty minutes?” asks McDowell. “Well that actually makes sense. Audiences figure things out; sometimes you don’t need to explain the set-up so blatantly. Thank Harold Pinter. Take Monster Butler that we just talked about. There are scenes where we see Fontaine as a 12-year old boy being traumatized. You don’t need that, the audience just needs to see my face with a twisted smile and they immediately see how fucked up this character is.”

Another great role McDowell played was H.G. Wells in Time After Time, a fictionalized account of the 19^th century novelist where Wells uses time travel to track Jack the Ripper (David Warner) to modern day (1980s) San Francisco. McDowell explains that he doesn’t usually do research per se. “The BBC had sent me a recoding of Wells from a 1930s radio broadcast, but his voice was high like a whine. I want you to believe me as a character and the voice doesn’t have to be part of the history. H.G. Wells was England’s Jules Verne, he was a progressive thinker of his time and I tried to play that contrasted with a modern day world that had already surpassed his ideals. Time After Time is really a love story at its core with the other parts of the plot swinging off that. Interestingly that movie paired me with David Warner. Warner and I used to pal around in in the early ‘60s, but then he was an established actor who’d already been in movies like Tom Jones and I was just starting out.”

One can’t simply conclude a conversation with McDowell without bringing up his work with two of the greatest film directors in history. McDowell got his big break in film when he was cast as Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson’s If… a film McDowell recalls as “creating a tsunami of controversy when it was released. It was as if the film had declared war on the gentry.” It was McDowell’s turn as a rebellious student that subsequently led Stanley Kubrick to cast him, without an audition, in A Clockwork Orange. On Anderson McDowell says: “It was like working with an Oxford don. Lindsay had a superior intellect and was a true cinematic genius.” McDowell also worked with Anderson on O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital sometimes referred to as the Mick Travis trilogy since McDowell’s character in all three has the same name, if not perhaps different motives. “Anderson is someone I miss everyday,” relates McDowell. An intimate documentary of sorts on Anderson, which evolved from a one-man show McDowell performed, Never Apologized is also available on DVD and explains through testimonials and Anderson’s own writings his vision of the world. In O Lucky Man! Anderson reminds the audience that revolution is the opiate of the intellectual. Another bizarre scene has Travis spending the night at a hospital in the backwoods. He hears strange sounds and in the next room discovers a man shivering in bed, only when he pulls back the covers the man’s head has been grafted onto the body of a pig. This Frankensteinesque imagery continues in the satirical Britannia Hospital when Travis is transformed into a human body with limbs and parts from all sorts of humans, including a huge black cock. “That last one was my idea,” McDowell says by way of matter of fact.

FPH asks McDowell if he’s seen the documentary Room 237, which explores hidden meanings and symbols in The Shining as well as other Kubrick films. For instance, in Eyes Wide Shut the Tom Cruise character is standing in front of a theatre marquee that displays photos from The Shining. “That doesn’t surprise me,” McDowell says. “Stanley was always ready for something like that. In Clockwork Orange for the record store scene he made sure a record of the 2025 soundtrack was front and center.” McDowell admits that he also has a penchant for veiled self-references. “The next time you see me in some movie I might be whistling Beethoven’s 9th.”

– Michael Bergeron