When we asked our villainous actors to name the most influential bad guys of all time, nearly every one cited Malcolm McDowell’s turn as Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 masterpiece A Clockwork Orange. Sexy, brilliant, menacing, and magnetic despite his horrific amorality, Alex was played by McDowell as both a trickster god and punk idol. The film went on to become one of the most controversial of the last century—it was banned in some places and blamed for copycat violence across the U.K.—and McDowell’s performance continues to be influential: You can see Alex in a whole generation of flashy, mad bad guys, from Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter to Heath Ledger’s Joker. In the years since Clockwork, McDowell has created dozens of villains in films, TV shows, even cartoons—playing everything from the cannibalistic mass murder of Evilenko to the ultimate Hollywood prick, Terrence McQuewick, on the HBO comedy Entourage. So who better to grill on what makes a great screen villain? ** **
**GQ: What scared you as a kid? **
**Malcolm McDowell: **I think we’re all a little afraid of the dark. If you lived in the country, as I did, there’s nothing quite like country dark, which was really black. And as a child, your imagination runs wild. I sit with my kids now and it’s very amusing, really, but of course to them it’s very real and you have to take it seriously. I was also terrified of heights. As an actor, I was asked to climb up a chimney stack once and it was strange. As the character I went zooming up this thing, but as soon as the director said, "Cut" I was completely paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t move. Somebody had to come up and lead me back down. But as the character, I went up like a bullet.
GQ: Do you remember what villain scared you first?****
**Malcolm McDowell: **The Wicked Witch of the West and Disney movies. The ugly sisters in Cinderella. It was so scary for a child. Later on, the only one who made me literally leap out of my seat was Alan Arkin in Wait Until Dark. Audrey Hepburn plays a blind woman, and he comes to kill her. The lights go out, but then he opens the refrigerator, which lights up the room, and that—my God, when he jumped out I think everybody in the cinema jumped. That was one of the scariest moments I remember growing up.
GQ: Do you ever draw on your fears or real experiences for a performance?
**Malcolm McDowell: **Not often. The villains that I play, I always think that they are grounded, wonderful people with enormous intellects who are very exciting to spend an evening with. I never see them as bad people. I mean, all right, they may do bad things, like killing for example, but I just can’t see them in black-and-white tones. I like to flesh them out, and give them a great sense of humor, something your audience can connect with and enjoy. We’re only entertaining people, and the more I enjoy it, it seems, the more the audience enjoys it.
GQ: Do you have a favorite fictional villain?
Malcolm McDowell: The best show unpredictability. My favorite actor who played villains—who could play anything, really—was Jimmy Cagney. Cagney in The Roaring Twenties, or White Heat. You know, it wasn’t the villain in the sense of what we know. He played the sort of man who was always in search of something that he could never get to. With his energy and his pistol-quick dialogue and that tremendous vulnerability that he had—he’d scare you, but he’d also make you cry. That, to me, is the mark of a great, great villain: They can be evil, but there’s always a vulnerability. Cagney is the best actor I’ve ever seen.
**GQ: When you played Alex in A Clockwork Orange, how important were the physical details, the costumes? **
**Malcolm McDowell: ** For me it was his love of Beethoven. Alex was such a complicated young man, an immoral character who you pull for because of this vulnerability that he shows and his love of life. Because of that people are drawn to him, and honestly I can’t remember a heavy before who was as stylized as he was, without cheating, without being sentimental, without playing to the audience. He is who he is, take it or leave it. I know he’s a murderer—he’s a rapist for god’s sake! You can’t couch it any other way; that’s immoral. But Alex loves Beethoven, so he can’t be all that bad. You could say that about Hitler, loving Bach. It’s quite a character really, a great black comedy that seems to have lasted through the years.
GQ: He was instantly controversial, to say the very least—
**Malcolm McDowell: **And it’s still here, forty years later. The main thing I remember is an outrageous sense of fun about it. Improvising "Singing in the Rain" to a rape, basically. Well, no wonder Gene Kelly wouldn’t talk to me when I came out here a year later! I mean, he looked at me like I crawled out from under a rock. I loved playing Alex. He was just so larger-than-life, and I think audiences connect more to the political side of it than the violence. The violence is old-hat, but the political element is still relevant. The film, basically, is about the freedom of man to choose. Whether he chooses to go down a righteous path, or the other path, that’s the thing.
GQ: What’s the most evil line you’ve ever uttered?
**Malcolm McDowell: **Honestly, I don’t think that you can quote one line. The villainy is between the lines. It’s not dead-on. It’s what’s going on physically.
GQ: Why do you think so many great villains are British?
**Malcolm McDowell: **Because it’s different to an American, for one thing. If you don’t want Germans or Russians, it’s always the Brits who get stuck with it. And it sounds better with a British accent, if you don’t mind me saying so.
GQ: Have you ever had a villain appear in a dream?
**Malcolm McDowell: **I don’t want to get into Freud here, but you mean my mother? I’m teasing—she’d be horrified. No. I play the weirdest sorts of people. I played this guy, Andrej Evilenko, who was a serial killer in the Soviet Union, and he killed over one hundred children, and was a cannibal and a pedophile. I mean how do you get up in the morning for that? Especially when you’ve got young kids? But I am a professional actor and I don’t go about moralizing about what the character does. Otherwise, seriously, why be an actor? You’re not making some kind of social statement. That’s not what actors do. They may inadvertently do it, but it’s because of the script, not the acting.
GQ: Do you find it hard to shake villains off when the scene is over?
**Malcolm McDowell: **It may appear that I find it hard to shake them off, but I don’t. Once it’s cut, I’m into silly walks. I’m done. What I did with that particular villain, the Russian one, was to wear the character physically, take a posture with it, so that when I finished a scene I would go back to being normal me and the physicality left me. Normally I work from the inside out, but this time I worked from the outside in, and that really helped me get through it.
GQ: How evil would you say you are, percentage-wise, in real life?
**Malcolm McDowell: **Ninety percent—maybe one hundred percent yesterday. [Laughs] No, I don’t think I am in any way, shape, or form evil. Of course not. So why do I get so many to play? I think it’s just physicality. If you look a little punkish, then they’re going to give you the parts. And if you play an iconic villain early on in your career, you tend to get asked to play one over and over and over again.
GQ: Do you fear clichés?
**Malcolm McDowell: **Never. I never feel I repeat myself. I really go out of my way to amuse myself. I would be bored stiff. If I feel the déjà vu when I’m doing something, I stop and rethink and rework it.
GQ: Whom do you consider purely evil in real life?
**Malcolm McDowell: ** The most dangerous people are always clever, compelling, and charismatic—like that cult leader Jim Jones, who had all his followers drink poisoned Kool-Aid. That, to me, is pure evil—to use the power God gave you to lead innocent people to death. I mean, how many people are given that great privilege?
