WASHINGTON — He’s known across generations as the star of Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), a movie masterpiece based on the dystopian crime novel by Anthony Burgess.
While that film forever entwined Malcolm McDowell with “Ludwig Van,” these days he’s keeping it classical in Amazon’s “Mozart in the Jungle,” up for two Golden Globes including Best TV Comedy.
“It’s a comedy-drama basically about an orchestra. That’s the very heart of our show. We’re members of an orchestra and that’s what binds us all together. It’s lifting the curtain to look into their lives and all the personal stuff when the performance is over and the rehearsals start,” McDowell tells WTOP.
Season 2 debuted in its entirety last week for all your binge-watching glory, just in case you fell into the infamous “Show Hole,” which McDowell voices for the Amazon Fire Stick commercials.
Inspired by Blair Tindall’s 2005 memoir “Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” the streaming series stars Lola Kirke (“Gone Girl,” “Mistress America”) as Hailey Rutledge, a young oboist auditioning for an orchestra while moonlighting in various Broadway shows. McDowell plays Thomas Pembridge, an eminent conductor pushed upstairs to take on a more behind-the-scenes board role.
“Basically it’s just to get rid of him, because they want to bring in Rodrigo, this young wonderful talent from South America. … They want to make the orchestra more accessible to young people.”
Rodrigo is played by Gael García Bernal, who starred in Jon Stewart’s directorial debut “Rosewater” (2014) and has since been nominated for a Golden Globe for “Mozart in the Jungle.” His character is inspired by Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who took over the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
“The first season, my character is in conflict with Rodrigo because he’s jealous obviously and being shoved upstairs by the younger talent, but in the second season, things have steadied and he becomes more of a mentor. … I love playing this part because he’s such a dichotomy of emotions.”
McDowell, Bernal and Kirke lead a deep cast, including Bernadette Peters (“Pennies From Heaven”), Saffron Burrows (“The Bank Job”) and Tony-winner Debra Monk (“Redwood Curtain”).
“The talent pool is endless. … We’ve had a great pool of people coming on and stuff. They love the show. They want to do it, because they’ve seen it and they love it. It’s getting a reputation, slowly but surely, that it’s really a classy show and people really want to be involved in it,” McDowell says.
Serving as a sort of “player-coach” is actor/filmmaker Jason Schwartzman (“Rushmore”), who not only plays the character “B Sharpe” but also spearheaded the show’s development with co-creators Roman Coppola (son of Francis Ford Coppola) and Alex Timbers (“Rocky the Musical”).
“Jason is the one who found the book, bought the rights and it took him ten years to get this thing going. He’s exactly what you see, this genuine, wonderfully inquisitive person … and he loves the music. He’s very much a part of choosing the pieces we use in the show,” McDowell says.
Much like the on-screen orchestra trying to appeal to younger generations, McDowell hopes the show itself will inspire younger TV viewers to discover the legends of classical music.
“If we can get a few young people to listen to some of these great classical composers, then that’s a sort of a little bonus. Every time I put on a piece of classical music in the car, my kids are like, ‘Oh God,’ but occasionally I slip one in and I just hear silence, and I know it’s hit home. It’s not fuddy-duddy stuff. They don’t know that this is where all great music comes from. They don’t realize that The Beatles were influenced by Beethoven and Mozart probably more than anybody else.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPq1tnrH_eM&list=PL28CE5427660B93F6
McDowell’s love for classical music began with the aforementioned “A Clockwork Orange,” which opens to Henry Purcell’s “The Funeral of Queen Mary,” continues with fast-motion sex scenes to Gioachino Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” and routinely recalls Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 9.”
“Stanley introduced me to Beethoven through that part and I’ve been a fan ever since. … Kubrick knew so much about these great composers. … I think ‘Clockwork Orange’ was the first album from a movie to go platinum. It was the biggest-selling soundtrack and people realized then that you could actually make money from movie soundtracks. They didn’t know that before ‘A Clockwork Orange.'”
Ironically, the soundtrack’s most unforgettable moment comes when McDowell recites the title song from “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), juxtaposing bubbly lyrics against horrific rape visuals.
“I am responsible for that myself, and I did apologize to the man responsible,” McDowell jokes, referencing our Technicolor memories of Gene Kelly — now forever altered.
McDowell earned a Golden Globe nomination for the role in 1972, and now, 44 years later, his show is vying for the prize. Just as Alex DeLarge pried his eyes open for brainwashed torture, we viewers have entered our own transfixed binge watching, fittingly articulated by McDowell’s “Show Hole.”
So what would he watch if he had his eyes pried open today?
“I would be watching ‘Mozart in the Jungle.’ … Here’s the joke. The ad-line for ‘Mozart in the Jungle’ is ‘Sex, Drugs and Classical Music.’ That is exactly the ad-line that Kubrick chose with ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ I think it just had the words ‘ultra violence’ added on. So life has become a circle for me.”
Listen below to the full interview, conducted remotely via phone while out of town over the holidays.
