I just watched Being John Malkovich. Very interesting movie. One thing that puzzles me…there seems to be a running joke in the movie that everyone seems to think John played a jewel thief in a movie, and he keeps insisting he never did. Is there some specific movie that these people are referring to, in which there’s a common misperception that Malkovich played the thief? Or was the joke completely an in-film one, not a reference to something related to the real-world John Malkovich?
As I understand it, and I’m sure more-informed Dopers will be along shortly to correct me, it was kind of an in-joke for the movie.
The idea being that the character would be an actor that everybody sorta kinda knew, but didn’t really know who it was… that guy who was in a bunch of movies, you know who I mean, that guy… and therefore couldn’t quite place him when they actually met.
John Malkovich is, in fact, this guy… or was until this movie was made.
Everybody thought he had played a jewel thief in the movies, in this movie, specifically because up until that point (in the real world) he never actually did play one. The producers wanted the recurring joke to revolve around something he’d never done, but everybody thought he had.
I’m not sure, but I have this nagging voice in the back of my head saying that, after making this movie, Malkovich did in fact go on to make a movie in which he was a jewel thief.
Malkovich? Malkovich malkovich, malkovich. Malkovich!
According to the imdb it was Johnny English.
I always thought that the cab driver had thought Malkovich was someone from Resevoir Dogs.
This was my favorite thing, hands down, about Johnny English. Nobody else I was with got the joke.
If JM had said no, it was going to be Steve Buscemi.
Maybe that’s where you got the Resevoir Dogs reference.
At first I thought about the counterfitter guy from To Live and Die in L.A., which isn’t a jewel thief, but pretty close. Then I remembered it was Willem DaFoe in that part, not Malkovich.
Wasn’t he some kind of thief in The Object Of Beauty? [WARNING: contains Andie McDowell]