John Malkovich is making the move from film to fashion.
The transition was revealed in an advertisement for Squarespace that debuted Tuesday. It opens with the two-time Oscar nominee burning a script, showing Malkovich’s transition from acting into his new passion for design.
“Sometimes if you’re known for one thing, then it’s hard for people …” he tells a pal over drinks in one scene. When the friend asks if he’ll be taken seriously, Malkovich replies, “Everything I ever did was a gamble … Now I have to justify my life to them? I don’t really care how they take me. They can take me as I am or not at all.”
In the next scene, a voice on the phone tells the actor, “John, I heard about this little project you’re trying. Come on, we have movies to make. I’m in L.A. Call me back.”
Throughout the rest, Malkovich is seen in various states of designing, from sketching to finally presenting his own fashion show, set to the sounds of DeVotchKa’s “How It Ends.”
It turns out, the “Being John Malkovich” star actually has quite the background in fashion.
“Since childhood, John has had an interest in clothes and fashion photography. He even studied costuming at university and, to this day, does costume design for theater,” his website boasts. “He walked the Comme des Garçons runway when no actor would and was featured in campaigns for Prada, Antonio Miro, and Armani, among others.”
The site continues, “John wrote and directed fashion films for English designer Bella Freud and wrote the ‘Christian Louboutin’ book foreword. He created fabric for Liberty of London, did a design collaboration with Bailey Hats, designed clothes for Pirelli, and partnered with French watchmaker Richard Mille.”
Malkovich also presented his Technobohemian line at New York Fashion Week in 2010.