John Malkovich is looking back on his infamous affair with Michelle Pfeiffer.
The actor, 71, opened up about the romance he had with his “Dangerous Liaisons” co-star while they were both married on the Sept. 3 episode of Bella Freud’s “Fashion Neurosis” podcast.
“It’s not something I’ve ever really talked about,” Malkovich said.
“Put it in this way, in the work I do normally, you make emotional bonds with people very quickly,” he explained. “That’s part of the work. Very rarely, those bonds extend beyond the work.”
Malkovich described Pfeiffer, 67, as “someone I valued greatly as a colleague, was great fun and moving, and with me, incredibly fair.”
“And I certainly wasn’t,” he admitted. “I think I’ve learned over the course of my life that a great colleague is actually rarer than anything. And when that relationship becomes more than collegial or more than a friendship, even a profound friendship, then at least in my experience, and it might be my particular psychology or stupidity or ineptness or all of the above… you lose a great colleague.”
Malkovich contrasted his affair with Pfeiffer to his decades-long working relationship with actress Ingeborga Dapkunaite.
“Ingeborga and I are still, 33 years now, working together and have remained great friends and colleagues because there is a line we never crossed,” the “Con Air” actor said.
“That’s what I’ve learned – that when a thing like that happens, it probably, might be, not retrievable,” Malkovich added.
Malkovich was married to Glenne Headly at the time of his affair with Pfeiffer. They got divorced in 1988, the same year the Stephen Frears-directed film came out.
Headly died at age 62 in June 2017.
Malkovich has been in a relationship with Italian production designer Nicoletta Peyran since 1989. They met on the set of the film “The Sheltering Sky.”
Pfeiffer, for her part, got divorced from husband Peter Horton also in 1988. The exes were married for seven years before they went their separate ways.
The “Hairspray” actress, who has never publicly commented on her affair with Malkovich, has been married to producer David E. Kelley since 1993.
“I got really lucky,” the mom of two told Parade in 2012. “I never take him for granted. I’ve never met a person who has more integrity than my husband. I respect that.”
“There’s his humor and intelligence, too, and he’s really cute, all those things,” Pfeiffer added of Kelley, 69. “But if you don’t respect your partner, you’ll get sick of him.”
