John Malkovich Plays A Different Kind Of Poirot In Amazon’s ‘The ABC Murders’, And That’s By Design

John Malkovich is one of those actors who has never had any problems moving between movies and TV; despite being nominated for two Academy Awards and even starring a movie where John Cusack lives inside his head (Being John Malkovich), he’s still a character actor at heart. This past year alone, he had parts in the Netflix movies Bird Box and Velvet Buzzsaw, he’s played Agatha Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot in The ABC Murders, and, when he called Decider, he was in Europe shooting the HBO series The New Pope. That doesn’t include his theater career, which will bring him to the West End this year to star in a new David Mamet play.

The three-part miniseries The ABC Murders, released by the BBC in December and premiering on Amazon on February 1, has Malkovich playing a very different version of Poirot, one that’s less fussy than the version in Christie’s novels or many of the detective’s screen portrayals; he doesn’t sport a handlebar mustache, doesn’t speak in an over-the-top Belgian accent, and is generally more along the vibe of Malkovich’s more weird and mysterious characters. We spoke about why he was attracted to the role, and why this isn’t like the usual Christie fare. Then he launches into some pretty Malkovichian monologues about how people consume movies these days, showing how much of his personality he brings to his parts.

DECIDER: What interested you in reviving the part of Poirot?

JOHN MALKOVICH: Well my interest was based on the fact that I got sent a script by an English writer called Sarah Phelps. I mean it came through my agency and it was kind of recommended as part. But just out of curiosity, which I often do or normally do, I read a few pages and I thought it was excellent and very much liked the character. I’m actually not familiar [with Poirot]. I mean I’m sure I read an Agatha Christie or two or three when I was young. But it’s not something that I’m really familiar with at all. And I’m not positive I ever really saw any of the various versions of either The ABC Murders or of Poirot, how he’s been played before. That was probably an inducement too in that I wouldn’t necessarily want to do something that I had seen before or knew very well. And this was such a deliberately different take on it.

What notes did director Alex Gabassi give on taking such a familiar character and putting a new spin or new take on it?

Well basically most of what we talked about was just very evident in the script that, at this point he lived in England 20 years at the outset of our story. And he had tried to kind of blend in to English society. He had had a popular time for a while and had solved these cases and had achieved some degree of notoriety in the UK. But that was many years before. At this point he’s sort of down on his luck. People don’t remember him. They’re not interested. The police force has moved on and they have some doubts about his seevy and about who he is really. And they express those doubts. And then Alex also didn’t want the same look he’d often had, Poirot, with a very sort of noticeable, or effusive let’s say, mustache described by Agatha Christie. Alex didn’t want him to have the French accent, or in this case, Belgium accent, a Francophone country, which didn’t interest him to hear nor me. We wanted to go for something that was much more English rather than the sounds that you always hear either from French people or people who did it in French accents.

The element of Poirot being retired and out of the limelight is new to this story. What was the purpose of having Poirot be retired combined with the elements from the book where the letters he gets lead him to these murders?

Well I think it was, to a certain extent it was about someone who was thought to have outlived his usefulness and someone who no longer had the requisite, what talent or patience or interest to help track down this murder. And I think they doubt that was a big part of Sarah’s script, that he was a forgotten person living in a foreign land.

How do you interpret that? What were the writer and director looking for from your version of Poirot?

I don’t know. You’d have to ask them really. But the things that Sarah made clear in the script, the script is what it is. That’s what you’re getting. You’re not getting the novel of ABC Murders. I didn’t look at it because it wouldn’t be helpful. I’ve done a ton of literature to stage, or literature to theater adaptations, but essentially with that if you’re not especially involved with the creation of it in terms of the creation of the script itself and only the script itself, then you read something and you say, “I like this take.” Or “I don’t like this take.” And it could have been absolutely conceivable that I didn’t like the take. But that’s what the screenwriter does. And I liked her take on it very much.

And then I liked Alex’s take about the whole story, the look, the accent, what Poirot’s life experience has been, etc., etc. And of course we understood that we were doing something that, at least in England, had been done before in a very long series with a very good English actor [David Suchet]. And had been done numerous times with terrific actors over the years either Death on the Nile or whatever it is. Murder on the Orient Express, etc., And many others from people like Albert Finney and Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh — terrific actors. But I wouldn’t have thought that one would see this and even realize that the source material is Agatha Christie in comparison, either.

Why do you say that?

Well because it’s very dark and it’s not sort of nod, nod, wink, wink. The character is an incredibly clever man with this and that catch phrase. [In accent] “Ze leetle grey cells.” You know. It’s not in this. So of course some people are going to not like that. And perfectly, understandably so. But that’s not what they were setting out to do. If they were, I don’t know if I would have wanted to do it, meaning if it was a different type of script or had a different point of view maybe. But I liked what I read when I initially read it. And I saw, I think at least to me, I saw what it could be and the ground it could cover. And I thought it had a lot of terrific parts in it and played by, as it turned out, a terrific cast.

What was the biggest challenge for you, either to prepare for the role?

Well I think it’s just a different version, meaning … If you go to do Hamlet you really don’t need to look like Laurence Olivier or imitate him or John Gielgud or a more modern Hamlet. You do your version. This is a much played character and I think there’s something like 35 active Poirot novels written by Agatha Christie. So I think you just make your own way and that means, that means ascertaining where you want to go and then constructing that. So that means how they look, how they sound, how they view the world, how they move through the world. In other words, their style. And that’s how I do it. I can’t say one thing is more difficult than the other. I wouldn’t necessarily call acting difficult. I would just say it’s, can be and probably generally should be that it’s very detail oriented. So you have to make specific choices that lead you in certain directions and you have to perform those choices in a believable way.

What’s an example?

I think there’s several. I think one is it took weeks just to let us go a different route in how he physically looked. I think Poirot was someone who was described earlier as a dapper sort of portly little man who was maybe five feet two or five feet four, I’m not. Who had a certain kind of Francophone accent, which I did not wish to do and, more importantly, the director did not wish to hear. One could say, “Oh, well that would have been more tragic and sad had it been that way.” And I would say, “Not really.” That’s also gendering an accent that’s more comic and silly in effect, in English. And it’s okay and it probably could be tragic, but when you set out to do something there’s a script and a point of view to follow and the director’s vision of it is super important. So I just really tried to make sure I accomplished a vision that the writer and director have in mind. If I don’t then it’s a failure.

The Poirot of the books is generally fussy and vain. And this, and the one that you play is fussy and vain, but not quite to the degree the one in the books is. Is that part of it?

Yeah. That just wasn’t in on the script. There was nothing fussy about him. There was something very insistent and particular and specific about the way he would like things done or the way he did things. As I said, the way he looked, the way he moved through his day and days, but this is a character who, in our script, I think one could easily make the argument couldn’t get away with being fussy.

You’ve gone back and forth from movies to TV for years. Where do you see the roles that you’re going play in the future going? Do you see them more towards projects like this that are more for streaming services, multi-parts or back to movies? Or do you think it’s going be a combination of the two?

I think it’s probably a combination in that last year I did seven movies, two years’ worth of TV series, on Billions, three episodes of this and now I’m doing The New Pope for HBO, the Paolo Sorrentino series. And what I like about that is length, the amount of time you spend with a character, the fact that you get a lot more time to do what you’re doing. But I’ve always sort of floated through. I had two films at Sundance. I did Bird Box. I have four or five films that aren’t even released yet from last year. As long as I’m able to work, I see just more of the same. When The New Pope finishes I’ll start a play to the West End and just keep going. I don’t have, I’m not, I mean I may have bored people, but I’m not bored.

Movies are not a great spot, I think generally. And the streaming services have certainly helped them, I mean especially Netflix. But series have a great deal of things going for them especially when you have good writers and show runners and etc., and enough resources to actually achieve what you’re trying to achieve. And movies generally don’t have anymore a lot of good secondary or tertiary roles. You shoot for five days or three days or four days, and then you end up to have kind of three scenes or something.

And that’s, I mean that’s absolutely fine, but that’s not economically where the form is making the most sense at present. It’s very difficult to do independent movies, small independent movies or so called artsy movies. We’ve done it at our company, but it’s very, very difficult to get them on, to get them seen. And very hard. Certainly I’ve never made a dime in producing movies.

What’s your view of the distribution model that Netflix has, where for the most part for the movies debut on Netflix at the same time as theaters. Now all of sudden they’re saying that movies like Bird Box are getting a lot of viewers. They really weren’t telling you how many viewers they were getting before. How do you feel about that model and how things are changing with movies in particular?

Well I’m fine with it, meaning I was taught in the business mostly by cameramen or camera operators even as opposed to say, cinematographers. I’ve learned what I know about the trade, about the form mostly from the camera operators that I worked with over the years. And some really great ones. And of course they were purists. They didn’t shoot on video. That didn’t even exist. The thought of it didn’t exist for years. And when it came out it was fought ferociously, but things change. Times move on.

Now I think a lot of them don’t think about it and you can see beautiful things on, you know that are shot digitally. Technology has improved. The form has changed. And most importantly because it is an audience oriented product you’re putting out, the main thing about a product is do people want it and how do they want it? Maybe they don’t want to go to a movie theater and fight with people on cellphones or listening to their own soundtrack or carrying a gun and thinking they’re the Joker.

Entertainment is delivered to them by and large in the case of Netflix, at home. And movie theaters have been around and were quite big for nearly a century. So were, I don’t know, drive-in stands where people, where waitresses were on roller skates and people drove up and got a table placed in their window of their car. That’s not the case so much anymore. There’s a guy who delivers it via Uber or it will be via drone or it’ll be shot out of a cannon from Iceland and land on a tablecloth, you know, who knows.

But those things change and I don’t think we have stuff to say about that. There is something particularly necessary about watching a movie in a dark room in a real cinema with 200 or 2000 strangers. Is that of benefit? Probably does have some benefit. I mean there probably is some collective vibe, some collective response. Something that is created in that interchange. But that happens in theater. And I would argue I don’t think it was ever as important in movies. In a theater you’re watching something living, something ephemeral. Something organic that, that’s not what movies are. It’s not a living form in that sense.

They always say, we have that phrase “I guess you had to be there”. Well you don’t for movies. You could be there tomorrow night. If you see Sexy Beast the day it comes out, great. Fantastic. Beautiful. You can see it three years later. It’s the same.

The ABC Murders was released over the holidays in England. What kind of reception did it get there?

Well I think there were a lot of divided opinions. Most especially about the take on it, about the introduction of the kind of immigrant or migrant element, which plays into things happening around the world at various sort of, there’s great discourse and I don’t necessarily mean high quality. I mean a great deal of discourse about the immigrant situation in Europe and the migrant situation in Europe, which is all across the continent. And those countries who don’t choose to take in migrants and those countries who do. And what the various citizens think about the countries that do and the countries that don’t. And there’s a wide variety of opinion just like there is in America.

And that was an element that was introduced, which I think some people really objected to. They wanted, to some people, I think, wanted the Poirot they had seen before, which they shouldn’t be too alarmed because it still exists. You can watch it anytime you want. And then some people seemed to love it and loved the take on it. So I don’t think any of us were surprised because a lot of the, sort of the negativity of some responses actually proceeded anybody having seen that new thing. It was just, “You can’t do that without the mustache. Please make the little funny French accent.” And blah, blah, blah. And that’s just not the game we were hunting.

But people get furious about all kinds of things. And once almost everything became political then this became about, for some people it became about Brexit. It became about fascism because it takes place at a particular point in English history and Oswald Mosley on some predilection towards, let’s say a sympathetic view of fascism rather than a sympathetic view of, at that time, of Communism or the Soviet Union or the Bolsheviks. So that’s, that’ll, I think, color the reception, I think, understandably so.

Given the right script, would you play Poirot again?

Yeah. I mean given, depending on what else I had to do and what the script was, what the character’s journey was. I love working with Alex Gabassi. I think he’s terrific. I liked very much Sarah Phelps’ scripts and I think this cast, I mean me, excepted obviously, but I think it’s an excellent cast. And a good story well told. Would I do it again? Maybe. If the circumstances were right.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders on Amazon Prime Video