Toronto CP with Malcolm McDowell for 2103 Deadly Wake/Pearl 5/6/96

McDowell the heavy - again!
Role in cult classic Clockwork Orange typecasts actor

Monday, May 6, 1996
TORONTO (CP) -- Malcolm McDowell strides on to the set of the futuristic sci-fi thriller he's shooting in a studio warehouse in industrial east-end Toronto to the applause of the cast and crew.
    He is filming 2103 The Deadly Wake, in which he plays a disgraced captain who must prevent the ship he once commanded from spilling its load of toxic waste.
    Twenty-five years ago, McDowell was the malevolent Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, a role that turned him into a legend. And even two decades later, his simply being here screams for mayhem to occur.
    Listening to him talk after the shoot, it's almost easy to forget his past and imagine him as a comic professorial type, a role, in fact, that he'll play in Pearl, a forthcoming TV series with Rhea Perlman, the barmaid from Cheers.
    When he sits down after completing today's scene, the distance between actor and Alex becomes readily apparent. For starters, listen to his plans for the weekend.
    "There is a big antique show tonight and then there is an auction at the airport tomorrow," he says.
    Antiques? Shopping? Auctions? These are the pastimes of the man who once led the nastiest "droogs" through some of the most violent rampages in movie history?
    McDowell's career could be roughly defined as before Alex and after Alex.
    Before Alex, McDowell was a bartender, a waiter, a coffee factory worker, a salesman and a messenger.
    He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and made his film debut in 1967 in Poor Cow. (not true - Alex)
    He enjoyed a few years close to the top of the British film industry, where he built a reputation playing rebels. After Alex, he began a slow but steady sideways drift.
    The film adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel may have forever ensured recognition of McDowell's name, but any more subtle nuances in his performance seemed to have been lost on directors who cast him in villainous parts in second and third-rate movies.
    Over two decades, he has appeared in more than 45 films.
    It may have been his misfortune that the looks that, at age 27, suited the role of Alex also condemned him to roles where his main function has been to, as he puts it, "come out and scare people."
    "If you do something like Clockwork Orange, you never escape it. Never. And the thing is, you know, that I don't fight it any more, I just do it."
    While McDowell has been mostly relegated to playing heavies in film, he has occasionally exercised his more subtle talents on stage.
    Among his favorite roles, he counts that of Jimmy Porter, John Osborne's British bad boy in Look Back in Anger - a wife-beating, mean, tortured man, and also, most certainly, a heavy.
    As the anger of the 1970s slowly burned out in the face of Britain's swift economic decline, McDowell's brief time in the rebel spotlight also came to a swift and premature end.
    In 1969, he had played Mick Travers, a student who initiates a surreal revolt against the administrators of his private boarding school, in Lindsay Anderson's If. In 1973, McDowell would recap the role of Travers in the fantasy O Lucky Man!
    He made the jump to the U.S., playing H.G. Wells in 1979's Time After Time, the last major role in which he played a good guy.
    "I can't afford to do that much theatre, you know," he says now. "For an actor, it's like going back to the gym for a really good workout, and I think you really should do it, once every two or three years, for sure. More if you can."