Being John Malkovich - Cast

Cast

• John Cusack plays Craig Schwartz, an unsuccessful puppeteer. Cusack read the film's script after he had asked his agent to present him with the "craziest, most unproduceable script you can find". Impressed with the script, he asked his agent to follow its progress and book him an audition, with which he won the role.
• Cameron Diaz plays Lotte Schwartz, Craig's pet-obsessed wife. Diaz's make-up artist Gucci Westman described styling Diaz in the role as "a challenge, to make her look homely". The script included minimal physical descriptions of characters, and thus when Diaz took up the role she did not know that "people weren't going to recognize me".
• Catherine Keener plays Maxine Lund, Craig's co-worker. Keener cited Being John Malkovich as an instance of her taking up a role based on the director's previous work. She had heard about Jonze's experience with music videos and took up the part of Maxine although she initially disliked the character and did not feel that she was right for the part.
• John Malkovich plays a fictional version of himself, albeit with the middle name Horatio instead of Gavin. Charlie Kaufman said that there was never another actor in Malkovich's place in the script: "The screenplay was always 'Being John Malkovich,' even before I had any expectation that John Malkovich would even read the script." He chose Malkovich because he believed there to be "an enigmatic quality about him that works", though Malkovich was partly chosen because of the sound of his name in repetition. Kaufman explained that "When we were thinking of alternatives, we found that a lot of them weren't fun to say." Jonze's then-father-in-law Francis Ford Coppola was able to contact Malkovich, and Jonze flew with producer Sandy Stern to Malkovich's home in France. Stern said that Malkovich was "half intrigued and half horrified" when he first read the script, but he eventually agreed to star in the film.
• Orson Bean plays Dr. Lester / Captain Mertin, the head of LesterCorp.