John Malkovich addressed his widely reported affair with Michelle Pfeiffer for the first time in years, telling Bella Freud’s "Fashion Neurosis" podcast that the romantic relationship with his Dangerous Liaisons co-star cost him a cherished professional bond.
"It’s not something I’ve ever really talked about," Malkovich, 71, said on the Sept. 3 episode. He described the quick emotional bonds actors form while working together and said those connections rarely extend beyond the work. "When that relationship becomes more than collegial or more than a friendship, even a profound friendship, then at least in my experience ... you lose a great colleague."
Malkovich and Pfeiffer, who was 67 at the time of his remarks, starred together in Stephen Frears’s film Dangerous Liaisons, released in 1988. Both actors were married when the relationship took place; Malkovich was married to Glenne Headly and Pfeiffer to Peter Horton. Both marriages ended in 1988. Malkovich said the professional consequences of their liaison remain part of what he has learned about maintaining long-term working relationships.
"I think I've learned over the course of my life that a great colleague is actually rarer than anything," he said. He contrasted the affair with his decades-long working relationship with Ingeborga Dapkunaite, noting that he and Dapkunaite have sustained a professional friendship for 33 years by maintaining a boundary he said he and others sometimes fail to respect.
Malkovich acknowledged personal responsibility, attributing the aftermath to his own "psychology or stupidity or ineptness or all of the above." He has been in a long-term relationship with Italian production designer Nicoletta Peyran since 1989; the two met on the set of The Sheltering Sky. Headly, Malkovich’s former wife, died in 2017 at age 62.
Pfeiffer has not publicly commented on the affair. She divorced Horton in 1988 and married television producer David E. Kelley in 1993. In a 2012 interview with Parade, Pfeiffer praised Kelley’s integrity and said she never takes him for granted.
Malkovich’s remarks on Fashion Neurosis represent one of the more explicit acknowledgments by the actor about the episode, which has been discussed in profiles and celebrity histories for decades. The film Dangerous Liaisons, an adaptation of the 18th-century French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, was a critical success and earned its principal cast widespread attention.
In the podcast, Malkovich framed the episode as a lesson in the professional risks of allowing on-set relationships to cross into the personal. He spoke in terms of regret about losing what he described as the rarer commodity of a dependable colleague, and he used the example of his ongoing collaboration with Dapkunaite to illustrate the value of maintaining boundaries.
The interview adds a reflective note to a chapter of Hollywood history that has been recounted in interviews and biographies over the years. Malkovich’s comments were published in a transcription and reported by several outlets following the Sept. 3 broadcast.