The actor has spent his career seeking out the weirdest roles possible. And his new portrayal of Tarzan is no exception – perhaps because Malkovich is playing Cheeta …

There’s freedom in being Julian Sands, an actor whose eclectic career has taken him from prestige romances to subversive indie movies and sinister TV shows – and to more than 50 countries. For proof, you could scan his résumé – or, if you are a thrill-seeker yourself, stake out his Los Angeles home where, over the rush of Sunset Strip traffic, you may hear Sands bellow his Tarzan call: “Aah-eeh-ah-eeh-aaaaaah-eeh-ah-eeh-aaaaah!”

“I’m not going to do it here, of course,” Sands announces in a coffee shop down the hill from his house – or, as he refers to it, his base camp. “But I tormented my wife practising, and it’s one of the things I’m most proud of in my life.” He learned the barbaric yawp for BBC Radio 4’s dramatisation of James Lever’s acclaimed novel Me, Cheeta: the Autobiography, a fictional memoir of the chimpanzee who starred in 12 Tarzan films alongside the former Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller. Weissmuller’s king-of-the-jungle yell was reportedly bolstered by mixing in the sound of a hyena, a camel, a dog, a violin and an opera soprano. Not Sands’s one, though: “That was me without any mechanical amplification.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Johnny Weissmuller with Johnny Sheffield as Boy and Cheeta. Photograph: Keystone Features/Getty Images

Me, Cheeta is a story of friendship and delusion set in 1930s Hollywood. Sands voices Weissmuller, and suggested his good friend John Malkovich play the ape. So we have actors playing two actors who weren’t quite up to healing each other’s loneliness, in part because they had no way of communicating.

“I think it’s a wonderful composite portrait of actors, particularly from older times when there wasn’t a consideration of taking care of yourself,” says Sands. “There was an indulged irresponsibility. Drinking, smoking and sexual misdemeanours were not the taboos they are today.” In old-school LA, the celebrity chimp fits right in as another status-conscious, sexist beast who obeys the city’s savage code.

A radio ape play may seem like another typically odd detour for Sands if you last saw him performing, say, his acclaimed one-man recital of Harold Pinter poems (directed by Malkovich). Yet Sands has been preparing for this role since he was a boy climbing trees in the Yorkshire hills and watching black-and-white Weissmuller reruns on TV. When he was six, he went to see Michael Caine in Zulu five times in one week, and it became his nickname at home, thanks to his four brothers. “It doesn’t take long for ‘Julian’ to become ‘Zulu’,” Sands says. Not long after that, his mother – also an actor – sent his picture to a casting director looking for a boy to play Tarzan’s friend. “I had this fantasy I would be working with Tarzan,” Sands sighs.

No such luck. But in his early 20s as an unknown, muscular British actor with long blond hair, he was offered the lead in Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. It would have been the first major film role of his career, so Sands took it extra-seriously, spending hours scaling ropes to obtain rippling pectorals and studying primate physiology with monkey movement specialists. He pulls up a set of pictures on his mobile phone. There he is, young and naked save for a skin-tone loincloth, leaping into the air with his limbs curled into a chimpanzee crouch.

Greystoke, alas, was delayed – Christopher Lambert finally took the role a few years later – so the producers shifted Sands over to Thailand for the Oscar-winning Cambodia-set drama The Killing Fields, which turned out to be fortuitous in a different way, as this was where he and Malkovich, then a stage actor in Chicago, first met.

“I remember the director giving me a long speech, basically telling me that Jules was too sensitive for the likes of me to hang around with,” Malkovich recalls. But when he walked into a food hall to meet the cast, as the other actors stood up to shake hands, Sands grabbed the croissants from two of their plates and shoved them in his mouth. “Oh, this is the person who’s too sensitive for me?” Malkovich laughs. “We’ve been great friends ever since – that’s now 35 years.”

Shortly after that, Sands married the journalist Sarah Harvey (now better known as Sarah Sands, the editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme), had his son Henry and burst on to the arthouse scene as the free-spirited heart-throb who woos a teenage Helena Bonham Carter in A Room with a View. In the film, Sands skinny-dips and gambols about full-frontal nude. The role made him famous, but when he and his wife then split up, he temporarily moved in with Malkovich, who volunteered to be Henry’s nanny. The gig lasted only six weeks thanks to a dispute over a broken washing machine, though neither claims to remember the details, but then Malkovich introduced Sands to the writer Evgenia Citkowitz, whom he married in 1990. The couple are still together.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Helena Bonham Carter in A Room with a View. Photograph: Allstar

“I didn’t want to become a Hollywood actor,” Sands says. The first few years he and Citkowitz spent in Los Angeles, he was continually off in Europe shooting independent films in Italy and Poland. He chose projects for their sense of adventure. “I was looking for something exotic, things that took me out of myself,” he says. “I think I found myself a little boring.” Many of his 90s movies were incredibly controversial, such as David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, billed as a film that never should have been made, based on a book that should never have been written. William S Burroughs’s book was once banned in Los Angeles, though the film sold out a large cinema on Hollywood Boulevard earlier this year, with Cronenberg in attendance. Sands was shaken when he saw the film again recently. “It wasn’t apparent to me just how significant it is,” he says. “How disturbing, how subversive, how really apropos today.”

Then, of course, there was Jennifer Lynch’s Boxing Helena, where Sands played a grotesque surgeon who quadruple-amputates his beautiful but cruel obsession, Sherilyn Fenn. Kim Basinger and Madonna both quit during filming. When Boxing Helena came out, Lynch’s twisted study of possession and sexual power scrambled the heads of audiences who wanted a simpler story with someone to root for. “It just got the worst reviews and was dismissed as kind of pornographic,” Sands says. “But, actually, the poetic and political content is, I think, very enduring.” If the film had debuted during today’s #MeToo conversation, people might have been more open to talking about misogyny and Fenn’s wicked take on the cliche of strong female character. At the time, though, Boxing Helena was deemed career suicide: Lynch didn’t make another film for 15 years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Sherilyn Fenn in Boxing Helena. Photograph: Allstar

Sands soldiered on doing films he found intriguing. He readily signed up for Mike Figgis’s experimental feature Timecode, shot in real time with four cameras and projected on a four-quadrant screen. “It was cubist cinema,” says Sands. Figgis initially asked him to play a British studio executive. Sands countered that he’d rather play a wacky masseur, a character he based on his younger brother’s own misadventures in Los Angeles. “We did it 15 times, so there are 15 versions of Timecode,” Sands recalls. “Mike chose No 15.”

With his high cheekbones and sharp yet silken voice, he has played lots of villains – in The Phantom of the Opera, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Vladimir Bierko in 24 – channelling his love of Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Vincent Price. “They were thrilling, exciting and glamorous.” He has no idea how many times he has died on screen. “I stopped counting a long time ago.” He is now shooting a Netflix show that films four miles away. He knows the distance because he prefers to walk to work.

Between movies and mountain climbing, his second fixation, Sands has settled-of-sorts into a life of serial adventures – whatever lets him conquer his fears. “You can spend a lot of time in your younger career being afraid. When I was a young actor, an older actor said to me: ‘Just try to stay in the game until you’re 60 and then things will really get interesting.’ I was like: ‘Sixty? What is he talking about?’” But he turned 60 this year and definitely feels the change. “The truth is, once you have been around long enough and have some experience, confidence and independence, there is a tremendous letting go of the things that are intrusive in your career: ambition, narcissism, jealousy, vanity, insecurity. You can spend a lot of time trying to stay a young actor. It doesn’t allow for emotional maturity. It’s infantilising.”

“He is a Tarzan,” says Malkovich. “He’s a physical entity of a physical force.” So when a challenge isn’t readily on hand, Sands creates his own. Like the time three years ago when he decided to wake up early and hike the nearly 22-mile length of Sunset Boulevard from downtown Los Angeles to the beach. “Just about at sunset, I touched the water and went in to have a beer,” grins Sands. One more goal achieved.

Me Cheeta: My Life In Hollywood is on BBC Radio 4 on 3 November at 2.30pm and on BBC Sounds.