John Malkovich on Jonah Hex

With Jonah Hex hitting theaters June 18th, we'll finally be able to see if the movie will do the comic justice and hopefully stay away from that Wild Wild West factor. The full trailer looked better than I thought it would and the cast is excellent, for the most part. Comic Book Resources sat down with John Malkovich who plays the film's resident bad guy, Quentin Turnbull.

CBR: Did you have input into the look of your character at all?

Malko: No, not so much. I think it’s pretty much based on the comic. I think it’s pretty much along those lines. But I didn’t really ask for input either.

CBR: Did they send you the comics when you were deciding (on signing up for the film)?

Malko: Yeah, I had seen it a few times before. Jimmy (Hayward, the film's director) had done some mock-ups of them that he showed me in Los Angeles.

CBR: A lot of people won’t be familiar with your character. Can you talk about the character you play?

Malko: Turnbull was a Southern plantation owner and very wealthy and very powerful. He feels Jonah has caused his son to be killed in a way, so there’s a big sort of revenge factor there. Turnbull also leads a group of kind of marauders, former Confederate soldiers. Eventually he hopes to overthrow the government...my character’s not so much involved with [the supernatural]. Maybe a tiny bit. At a point in the story, Hex has kind of aberrations, and I appear very briefly as one of those, and we sort of work that out together. It wasn’t really quite what’s in the script.

CBR: Were you a fan of the genre (Comic Book Movies)?

Malko: Well, we’ve done, in production, we’ve done two comic novels: "Ghost World" and "Art School [Confidential" by Dan Clowes], so I’m not really an aficionado. I know a bit about it. I liked comics when I was a kid and read them and everything, but for me work is work. Everything allows for possibilities and failures.

CBR: As the villain, is your performance more restrained or animated?

Malko: Well, I don’t know, I spent the entire last two nights yelling, so I don’t know how restrained that is.

Malko also mentions that his performance doesn't come across as 'cartoony' as the script may have originally intended, but indicates there may be some of that element that comes out in his performance.