As much as celebrities are paid, you'd think they'd be more careful with their money. Turns out there are a lot who are notoriously bad when it comes to keeping their fortunes.
Some are just flat broke while others have lost their millions altogether. Then there are some celebrities like Johnny Depp and Nicholas Cage whose spending habits need to be curbed.
John Malkovich knows what it feels like to lose it all quite fast. But he didn't lose his fortune from spending it on a weird Barbie collection or buying other weird expensive things. He lost it because he trusted the wrong people and got burned for it.
Let's take a look at how he lost his $50 million net worth.
Malkovich Was Scammed
Malkovich has 129 acting credits according to his IMDb... but he's a walking contradiction. He reportedly hates movies and would prefer it if you'd never seen any of his films. Most of the time he's working in theatre instead or behind the scenes.
But he worked really hard to earn his net worth, and to have it all taken away was probably not what he expected to happen.
Apparently, his net worth disappeared more than a decade ago, and it's all thanks to a pretty famous scam. Malkovich told The Guardian that in 2008 he was defrauded of everything he had... from none other than the king of Ponzi schemes, Bernie Madoff.
When he was asked if he'd be upset if he never got an acting job ever again, he said no in a weirdly optimistic tone. "It would require a change in the way we live. But we already did that 12 years ago. So that would be fine."
That change to his way of life came when Madoff escaped with his and countless other's life savings, a grand total of about $64.8 billion actually, which earned him a 150-year prison sentence.
"Our then business manager had invested pretty much everything we’d ever made with somebody called Bernie Madoff," Malkovich explained. "Everything I’d ever made was gone."
But even as he found out about the scam, he was cool as a cucumber just like always. He'd been in Mexico City, directing a play when he saw the picture of Madoff in handcuffs. He said to his wife, "I’m going to go to the corner to get a packet of cigarettes. I think we have a little problem with Madoff."
After that it "was a couple of days of shock, I suppose," Malkovich said.
Malkovich reportedly invested $2 million to Madoff but was later awarded $670,000 back after the liquidation of the scammers firm.
When Vanity Fair asked him in 2013 if he had anything to say to Madoff, Malkovich said, "I only met Mr. Madoff once, many years ago. He seemed very pleasant. But, you know, I don’t think I’d have much to impart. For me, in all honesty, it was a good life lesson."
He Plays The Lose Off Like It's No Big
Malkovich's reaction to the whole situation is classic Malkovich.
"I don’t think it mattered that much. We just made changes to the way we lived and the money we spent," he said.
Those changes ended up being; "I had to do more work that paid for a number of years, and work all the time. And I stopped paying for everything. I just stopped paying for friends and family for a time. And we used to spend a lot of money producing movies that lost quite a lot of money. That stopped."
While some people probably felt pretty angry that they'd lost everything, Malkovich had a puzzling perspective on it. He wasn't angry at all, except during the first couple of days he spent in shock, but he got over it and realized that this was how some people feel all the time.
"After a couple or three days, you go: ‘You’re lucky to be alive, you’re lucky to have a job.’ Almost no one has money in the banks. I read somewhere that a huge percentage of Americans wouldn’t have $400 to put between their hands in an emergency."
He told Details Magazine a similar thing. "I don’t view it as a negative experience…To me it was, ‘You think you have a bunch of money – and you don’t.’ So what? Most people don’t (have a lot of money). I think it kind of reconnected me to how most people live all the time. And, unlike a lot of people that were involved in the Madoff thing, I could just go back to work, and it was fine."
This is a pearl of refreshing wisdom, especially coming from a person who had a pretty horrible upbringing. His father and older brother often beat him, and he was picked on and called Piggy by his schoolmates.
But through all of that and even losing his money, Malkovich is able to look on the bright side and not let anything affect him. But that's what being John Malkovich is all about.