There’s a scene in that modern classic of screwball existentialism, “Being John Malkovich,” from 1999, in which John Malkovich, playing a version of himself, enters a portal that others have been using to climb inside his mind. Suddenly, Malkovich is in a world populated solely by variations on himself: Malkovich as a flirtatious sexpot, a genteel waiter, a jazz chanteuse, a bemused child, everyone speaking only the word “Malkovich.” In a way, that scene is a microcosm of the actor’s decades-long, always-interesting career. He has played a million different parts, but somehow they’re all defined by the unmistakable, enigmatic, magnetic presence of Malkovich. Same goes for his work in the Apple TV+ series “The New Look,” premiering Feb. 14, which is based on the experiences of the fashion icons Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, Cristóbal Balenciaga and others who helped build the French fashion industry while enduring the impossible complexities of World War II. Malkovich, playing the couturier and Dior mentor Lucien Lelong, delivers a softer, warmer performance than the ones for which he is probably best known. But even so, with his off-kilter line readings, his louche manner, his oddly wavering yet commanding voice and his general air of playing a game to which only he knows the rules, the role is, as always, pure Malkovich.

If we take style to mean a manner of doing something, could you articulate the John Malkovich style? Not really, because it’s not something I think about much — what I am or what I do. But I’ve always felt style is the only constant in life. By style I mean, simply, the way you move through life. If you get sad news, how do you respond? What do you do if you’re angry, if you’re amused, if you’re moved? That’s what style is. It’s not really up to me to say what mine is.

Do you think of style as something that people cultivate or as innate? That’s a great question. If you’ve lived long enough — which I classify under If You’re Lucky — you experience things. So it’s cultivated based on your native curiosity and on the experiences you’ve been granted or blessed with or suffered through.

John Malkovich in “The New Look.”

Apple

The book has a long interview with you where you say: “I’m capable of belief, at least inside the theater. Outside of the theater, not so much.” Why? Because that’s what my life has taught me. It took me seven years of analysis to learn that when people said something, it isn’t necessarily what they meant. I’m not very clever. I remember once meeting the head of a country — I won’t say which one — at a dinner one night after a performance in a faraway land. He kept telling me about how uncorrupt the country was because he was running it. I think he’s still in prison. That’s what I mean. Theater, it’s a perfect world. Life is more like making a movie: push a boulder up a hill every day and hope it doesn’t flatten you. So I’ve always felt most at home in the theater — at home with myself, my emotions, my colleagues, their emotions, with how we express them. That’s harder to find in life.

Aside from work, what do you believe in? I believe in people, generally. I believe in humanity, somewhat. I have a great mistrust of ideology. Maybe even more than I do religion. I’m not a believer, but I don’t make some big show of it. I’m wary of all the things that people believe that make them think they’re them.

Explain that. People who say my ideology is this — yeah, but that changes. It’s based on feelings and what you know and what you don’t. I think people are more interesting than that. I’ve directed Terry Johnson’s play “Hysteria” three times. It’s about the meeting of Freud and Dalí, and in my opinion Freud was right in that the study of us is enough. Let’s don’t complicate more than we need to. That’s what a lot of our beliefs do, in my opinion. Which, of course, can be wrong.

Malkovich and Spike Jonze on the set of “Being John Malkovich” (1999).

Maximum Film/Alamy

For about 20 years. It was more than a week, let’s say. But at the Venice Film Festival, when the audience understood that Charlie was my best friend, there was a rolling laugh that lasted 10 minutes. It destroyed any lingering existential malaise. The line when I’m talking about being harassed by this coven of lesbian witches, and he says, Listen, man, give me her number when you’re through with them. That’s a tough line for anybody but Charlie.

Aside from Charlie Sheen’s work, what might you turn to when you’re trying to combat existential malaise? I’m not very existential because I’m not profound. So many people think a lot about this or that. I don’t think about this or that. I just do this or that.

You’ve now made reference a couple times to your own lack of profundity or insight. There’s evidence out there that there’s something going on behind the eyes of John Malkovich. Hard to say what it is though.

Hard to say. That’s my problem.

Malkovich in “Rounders” (1998).

John Clifford/Miramax Films

You’ve done a lot of disparate work, and yet there’s always some Malkovich-ness that comes through. You’re not one of these actors who people talk about as subsuming themselves into the character. There is a kind of technical actor who does often fantastic and pretty purely technical things. I’m not really that, and I’m not sure how much it fascinates me. Often that just draws attention to itself. I can appreciate it, especially when somebody’s very good at it, but I don’t think there are 50 characters like that in an actor. There are, like, five. For me, I think more about their worldview.

You left me hanging on something: Do you remember what it was about “Being John Malkovich” that made Spike Jonze say you were too close to it? I do. That was after I’d seen the cut of the film that was going to be shown to the people from Cannes. Although his best note in that vein was when he told me some choice I had made, he told me that wasn’t the way John Malkovich would do it. Which I thought was fantastic.

But what was your reaction to the screening? I didn’t like it. What I said to Spike is I thought he had made a Bergman film out of it, and it was already a Bergman film conceptually, so what it needed was to go back to kind of Jewish vaudeville. I found it very long and not funny. The cut I saw was almost 20 minutes longer than what was released. I have great faith in Spike and his talent, and I knew he’d shot fantastic things — it was not punchy enough for the way it was written. That was my opinion, and then when I saw it again, that’s the film that was released, and it was very good. A lot of times directors can want to put everything in, but there is a film one conceives, there is a film one writes, and then there’s the film one shoots. But none of those things actually exist. There’s only the film you edit: That’s the only thing that actually exists, and a lot of times people want them all to exist together, and they can’t. Editing does what it wants, and the more you fight it, the more trouble you’ll have.

Your grandfather’s brother was murdered? His older brother.

Did that loom over the family? No. He was an attorney, and as I remember it there was a person who was called Dr. Gore, and his son, I believe, had been accused of murdering the doctor’s second wife. Carl had started the newspaper, and Dr. Gore had told him he would kill him if he defended the son in this trial, which he chose to do, and Dr. Gore shot him in the back in the alley of the newspaper office. That’s all I remember about it. So that’s how my grandfather got the newspaper. He was an amputee, and then a double amputee, so my grandmother did all the work and published the paper while he talked to people at various cafes and bet on the horses.

Are you like Steve? In some ways. There was something like a child about him.

That makes me think of your being able to find belief in the theater more easily than outside. So many things in life are kind of unsolvable and therefore, at a certain point, incredibly tiresome. People feel that and then absolutely know the opposite is true. As they say in New Jersey, “g’head.” I don’t know.

Malkovich (left) with Dustin Hoffman in “Death of a Salesman” (1985).

Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Alamy

I want to go back to the line that you quoted from “Death of a Salesman”: “Life is a casting off.” You’re 70 now. What are you casting off? You have to let go of the past, of connections. At this age, there are people who are dead now that were very close to me. There are people I love to have a conversation with — who I sometimes dream of and have the conversation in dreams — that I’ll never see again. That’s a natural part of life. You have to let it go. It’s cast off in the sense that it’s allowed to float away. It’s also not weighing you down. It’s gone.

And what are you holding on to? Family, work, friends. Not as many as I used to because some people close to me didn’t choose to maintain that relationship, and sometimes I didn’t choose to, which, of course, is everyone’s choice. I just, as Joan Didion said, play it as it lays.

Opening illustration: Source photograph by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.