The problem with watching a Hollywood actor perform in a very character driven role is that you can easily be distracted by their own well-known public life. Maybe it’s just me, but sadly, I don’t just see a race car driver, I see Tom Cruise acting like a race car driver and Tom Hanks acting as though he is friends with a volleyball. I mean, I know they are very accomplished actors and all, but it’s just how I see them. Some actors, though, can blur the line between their real selves and the characters they portray. For example, even though we know him as the loving (though sometimes troubled) brother from Six Feet Under, if you were on the same side of the street as Michael C. Hall, wouldn’t you cross the road?
Not unlike Hall’s fiercely convincing portrayal on HBOs Dexter, when John Malkovich takes the stage this evening as character Jack Unterweger, we’ll be compelled by his transformation to serial killer. Cleverly, we are invited within the first few moments of The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer, to embrace the man and eerily witness as he blurs that line between Actor and character through simply a name.
“My name. Jack.” He tells the audience, “You might ask what’s so special about being named Jack?”
“Only that Jack, as you may know is Johannes or Hans in German, Juan and Giovanni in Spanish and Italian.
And of course, John. John may seem a common name. Just John.
But if you wear this name, women will love you or hate you -- call you a liar or pervert -- but they will never leave you alone.
Like it or not, that is the truth…”
To blur the lines even more, this fictional story is based on the truth. And yes, Unterweger was a very real convicted murderer, who in 1976 was sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing of a teenage girl in his native Austria. While incarcerated, he learned to read and write and with such proficiency he, as the show notes promote, “reinvented himself as a literary celebrity” with his best selling and highly acclaimed prison-autobiography, titled Fegefeur (Purgatory).
Widely viewed as a “triumph of rehabilitation” by 1990 he was granted a presidential pardon and paroled. The short story (you can read his long story here) -- Unterweger worked as a journalist and famously tracked stories on crime, travelling from Austria into Germany and even over to Los Angeles, in an effort to interview and research possible connections to unsolved murders of working prostitutes.
Eventually the crimes were traced back to him, reportedly after chasing Unterweger through the US and parts of Canada. He was returned to Austria and tried and convicted on 11 counts of first-degree murder. According to Wikipedia, “On 29 June 1994, Unterweger was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. That night, he committed suicide at Graz-Karlau Prison by hanging himself with a rope made from shoelaces and a cord from the trousers of a track suit. He is reported to have used an intricate knot identical to that used on the murdered prostitutes. Because he died before he could appeal the verdict, under a technicality of Austrian law, Unterweger is officially to be considered as innocent, despite the original guilty verdict.”
The Infernal Comedy, which comes to Massey Hall tonight (Friday) and tomorrow, is inspired by Unterweger’s story. It takes place after the author’s death, with Malkovich portraying the already deceased killer, now launching his latest book. Speaking directly to the audience, the mood darkens with the live soundtrack performed by the world-renowned Vienna Academy Orchestra as well voices of two sopranos who sit in to symbolize the “women in Unterweger’s life.”
Maybe it’s simply that you can be too well-known to be in the acting business? Or maybe it’s the thought of being manipulated by a serial killer that loans a certain authenticity to an actor’s rapport with an audience?
What I’d like to know is, after these shows, if you see John Malkovich out and about, will you stay on the same side of the road?
Stephen McGrath is Soundboard editor and media relations manager at Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall
