Malcolm McDowell Reveals The Story Behind How Stanley Kubrick Cast Him in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

While chatting with Billy Corgan on The Magnificent Others podcast, legendary actor Malcolm McDowell shared an incredible behind-the-scenes story about how Stanley Kubrick chose him to play Alex DeLarge in the 1971 dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange.

For years, McDowell assumed Kubrick had simply cast him after seeing his breakout performance in the 1968 If… directed by Lindsay Anderson, but as he recently learned, the real story was much more interesting.

“I was doing, you know, Q&A things and …somebody asked me how I got to be cast and I went, ‘Oh, I think he saw ‘If….’ That was all I knew and so Cristiane said, ‘Oh, Malcolm, no.’ What happened was the film was the red hot thing in London.

“Everybody was talking about ‘If…’ and Stanley had a projectionist on 24/7 standby got Paramount to bring out the reels of film to watch it and they were all there watching it at the house.

“She goes, ‘You made your first entrance. Stanley hit the intercom and said, ‘Uh, re-lace that.’ Let’s see that again. Four times. After the fourth time… Stanley looked at his wife and said, ‘We found our Alex.’”

That moment sealed McDowell’s fate as one of cinema’s most unforgettable characters. The story captures both Kubrick’s obsessive attention to detail and the spark of inspiration that led to one of the most iconic casting choices in film history.

McDowell’s performance in A Clockwork Orange became a defining role, not just for him, but for the legacy of Kubrick’s crazy, unsettling vision of dystopian rebellion.