Malkovich, Kubrick and Uncle Kimono

“I have a fear of control freaks,” John Malkovich said last week, “because it’s the antithesis of expression and investigation and voyage and even process. Generally, there’s pretty much always a distance you have to travel to get somewhere—and if someone is binding you by the arms and the legs and trying to put a bolt through your brain and the mouth, I don’t much like that.”

Luckily, Brian Cook, the director of Colour Me Kubrick (in theaters March 23), allowed the 53-year-old Mr. Malkovich to let loose playing an effete, vodka-swilling, white-short-shorts-wearing Alan Conway, the real-life con man who masqueraded as reclusive director Stanley Kubrick in the 1990’s.

“It was a very sort of liberating thing to do,” said Mr. Malkovich. “Brian is not a control freak, so you could really—I don’t want to say do what you want, as in, “Come in and either do nothing or create chaos,” but rather do what you want in that you’re free to be able to create; you’re free to be able to find your way to something.”

In the film, Mr. Malkovich wears mascara and lures London playwrights, fashion designers and musicians into giving him freebies, from cigarettes and cab fare to hundreds of dollars in free meals.

“I found the idea quite funny—this guy going around posing as Stanley Kubrick, of all people, and making people believe him, only because they are so vain,” Mr. Malkovich said. “People believed whatever he said, because when you’re talking, they’re not really listening to you—they’re sort of practicing their acceptance speech. The absurdity of, say, having Stanley Kubrick be the manager of a heavy-metal rock band does not occur to them, apparently.”

Mr. Malkovich was speaking by phone from South Africa, where he has started to film Disgrace, directed by Steve Jacobs and based on J.M. Coetzee’s grueling Booker Prize–winning novel. The actor was sitting in his outdoor “salon” overlooking a recycling center to escape from the suffocating heat inside his temporary home. “Most nights around this time, I’m doing the dishes or making dinner,” he said. On the previous night, it was a chicken breast and lentil salad. “It’s a lovely country, but we work a lot, and I don’t get to see much.”

Disgrace chronicles the downfall of one David Lurie, a Cape Town professor who seduces a poetry student. “He’s sort of cold and awkward and closed,” Mr. Malkovich said. When the affair is exposed, the professor hightails it to the countryside with his daughter (played by Australian actress Jessica Haines), where post-apartheid politics sets tragedy in motion.

“It’s a great book; that’s what interested me,” Mr. Malkovich said. “The point of being an actor is to have certain goals or desires or wants that one would never have in real life—or never want to own up to in real life.” About the David Lurie character, he added: “He has nothing particularly sort of super-compelling about him—I mean, that’s not how he is. He’s a second- or third-rate academic who gets disgraced, and he has to figure out a way to live despite the thing that happened to him—which we all do at some point in our lives.”

Mr. Malkovich has always shown an ability to work in both tragic and comic (albeit darkly comic) modes. Colour Me Kubrick offers a giddy dose of the latter. In the opening scene, Malkovich-as-Conway-as-Kubrick glides downstairs into a red-flushed bar, paunchy belly pouring over stylish trousers, and approaches an ambitious fashion designer to introduce himself, in a breathy, serpentine voice, as “Stanley. Stanley Kubrick.” The next day, we see a brasher Conway, dressed in trench coat and baseball cap, conning a rock band.

“It sort of occurred to me that there’s no real point in doing a heavy Alan Conway who had a particular way of playing Stanley Kubrick,” Mr. Malkovich said. “I don’t think he had any clear idea or even an interest in Kubrick’s character—although he had lots of insight into the people who wanted to meet Kubrick, or work with Kubrick, or mooch off Kubrick, or bask in his glow.”

And Mr. Malkovich and his director couldn’t resist adding to the trove of cinematic “meta–John Malkovich” moments: During one scene, a sloppily drunk Conway claims he knows just who he wants to cast as the lead for his new movie, 3001: A Space Odyssey: “John Malkovich.” To which his dining companion responds: “Who’s that?”

Being John Malkovich is a lot of work these days: This year, Mr. Malkovich stars opposite Tom Hanks in the comedy The Great Buck Howard, and joins Anthony Hopkins in Robert Zemeckis’ adventure-fantasy Beowulf. Meanwhile, in the summer, he’ll be bunking in Paris, where he’ll direct Zach Helm’s play Good Canary, set to open in the early fall. And though it’s already been announced that he’ll appear with Peter O’Toole, Virginie Ledoyen and Daryl Hannah in the epic Love and Virtue, his schedule is overflowing and he’s unsure.

All of this work has kept him from his wife, Nicoletta Peyran, and their two teenage children. After years in France, the family relocated in 2004 to the Boston area, where the kids attend school.

How does he find America these days?

“The cultural cacophony, which was always there, got just sort of amped up,” he said. “More contemptuous, more hateful, louder.”

Mr. Malkovich said that while his film schedule has meant time away from his family, working more in theater wouldn’t resolve that issue. “The problem is, if you do a play, you don’t see your kids anyway,” he said. “They go to school during the day, and you do the play at night. You go and do the play while they’re on the computer and PlayStation and whatever, and allegedly doing homework, and you come home and they’re pretending to be asleep.”

First famous as a stage actor—Frank Rich called him “a combustive figure onstage, threatening to incinerate everyone and everything around him”—Mr. Malkovich was last on stage in 2005, when he did Stephen Jeffreys’ Lost Land, a production of Steppenwolf, the Chicago Theater company he co-founded with Gary Sinise in 1976.

Meanwhile, Uncle Kimono—his fashion line—has bitten the dust. “I’m not doing that anymore,” he said, before hanging up in the South African sunset. “I wasn’t getting what I wanted, production-wise, with the quality I wanted. And you know, that’s no loss to the high-fashion world.”