John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell and Martin McDonagh on Wild Horse Nine’s villainous heroes

By his own estimation, John Malkovich as made “150 films or so”. With a filmography that spans decades, genres, budgets and ambitions, not every movie is going to hit.

But he’s really happy with Wild Horse Nine, the latest black comedy-drama from filmmaker Martin McDonagh.

“It’s what he wrote and what he directed, and what we did,” Malkovich told The Nightly. “So, that’s as good as you can ask for. Brilliant. Sometimes you may see something and go, ‘That’s really not what we did, but (Wild Horse Nine) is.”

Malkovich leads Wild Horse Nine alongside Sam Rockwell in a story set in Chile in 1973, in the months before the 1973 coup d’etat, which saw the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende removed and killed.

Malkovich and Rockwell’s characters, Chris and Lee, are CIA agents part of an effort to foment and fund the coup, part of a wider American government strategy to destabilise and manipulate political events in Latin America as a proxy in the Cold War.

The film largely takes place on Easter Island, where Lee has taken Chris, his mentor, on a last hurrah holiday, while also being tasked by their boss (Steve Buscemi) with ensuring that the increasingly erratic Chris’s upcoming memoirs aren’t going to reveal a lot of agency secrets such as, oh, the JFK assassination.

McDonagh, the Irish filmmaker who developed a reputation for his sharp writing, a wicked sense of humour and a penchant for morally compromised characters through films such as The Banshees of Inisherin, In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, has been fascinated by Chilean history since his teens.

He had the kernel of an idea for Wild Horse Nine around 15 years ago, when he visited Easter Island for the first time and thought it would be a great place to film.

“I tried to some versions of it, always with two guys,” McDonagh said in Venice, the day before the film’s premiere at the city’s renowned film festival. “Sometimes it was a father and son, one was always in poor health, but nothing really quite worked until I brought in the CIA of it, and to give them a bit more of a reason for being there.”

That period of history – and all the conspiracies around that time still persistent today – is rife for drama, and it’s a clever conceit to situate what is essentially a personal relationship story, the conflict in the friendship between these two men, a McDonagh specialty, against the backdrop of political turmoil.

“It’s a fun and dangerous platform for the drama and comedy in the script, so that sets up the stakes and it sets up a dangerous environment for the two characters,” Rockwell said.

“What’s good about the 1973 Chile (context) is that our (characters’) lives are literally at stake because our boss could off us.”

Malkovich explained that early scenes shot in Santiago on the set of the CIA bureau was on location facing La Moneda Palace, where Allende died during the coup. “When you’re in the actual place where something that momentous happened, of course it has an effect,” he said.

Buscemi, too, felt the weight of it. “But then you have to not discard it but go, ‘OK, this hasn’t happened yet (in the story of the film)’, and you can’t let that totally affect what you’re going through. But, certainly, underneath, you feel it, ‘this is where it happened’.”

It might seem jarring to make a black comedy out of a piece of world history that resulted in so many deaths and changed the trajectory of a continent. But humour and entertainment is sometimes necessary to make sense of something so awful, especially when viewed in a 2026 environment when geopolitics feels again very fraught.

“If you’re in tune to what’s going on in the world today, I think this movie will feel very relevant,” Buscemi added. “But also, hopefully it’s entertaining. Both things are important because people tend don’t like being lectured to.

“This is a unique and entertaining way to learn this story.”

Ailin Salas, an Argentinian actor who plays a student revolutionary in Wild Horse Nine, said, “It’s good that the movie shows that history the CIA has. It’s not really common to see that in movies.”

Her co-star, Mariana di Girolamo, an Chilean actor, added, “It’s something that happened. Not only in Chile but in other countries like Argentina. (The CIA) funded the Chilean coup, it’s something that’s part of the story.

“When governments intervene in other countries or governments, it has great human consequences, terrible consequences.”

When McDonagh wrote Wild Horse Nine, he wasn’t trying to deliberately map current world events onto his historical film, but he said modern day sensibilities inevitably crept in.

“If you make anything, and you’re open to the world, stuff creeps in, it’s part of it, and I hope it will be why it resonates today,” he said.

If the characters of Chris and Lee were in another movie, skulking around with their stories, their histories and their weapons, they would absolutely be the villains. CIA agents involved in political conspiracies and with high kill counts don’t make for warm and fuzzy heroes.

But McDonagh is a master at creating problematic characters with the capacity to immediately engender your empathy. He did it with Colin Farrell’s assassin in In Bruges, he did it with Brendan Gleeson’s cold fiddler in Banshees and, some would argue, with Rockwell’s racist cop in Three Billboards.

“It’s mostly about trying not to judge any of your characters, the good ones or the bad ones, or at least make them as human as possible,” McDonagh said of his approach. “If you make them human, if we’re decent people, then we can maybe see ourselves in them or how we could’ve gone to that place if made the wrong choices.

“It’s a fascinating thing to explore the darkness of a character, but the thing to hang on to, particularly for Malkovich’s character is his guilt, or his growing guilt and regret about the things he’s done.”

Rockwell theorised that audiences respond to the “dog-eat-dog honest of a gangster, so to speak” and Malkovich put it down to McDonagh’s writing – “he’s just a clever writer”.

Malkovich, Rockwell and McDonagh all have theatre backgrounds, so there’s a reverence for the dialogue. Rehearsals took place at the Public Theatre in New York, and Parker Posey, who has just one but very memorable scene in the film, said she was “’in heaven” just listening and watching the process.

McDonagh added, “I don’t think you would necessarily get that (respect for the script) from an actor who’s solely a film-based actor, but also a trust in the rehearsal process. Conversely, this is the most improvisatory of any of my films.

“I’ve had the trust in them being such great actors to go off the book a little bit more than usual. They did that in almost every scene, and that’s what keeps it quite fun and fresh from scene to scene.”

Because their characters spent so much time together, Malkovich and Rockwell were their own little unit during production. The two had previously shared the screen together in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but that was tiny compared to Wild Horse Nine.

“We were kind of anti-social at that hotel,” Rockwell recalled of the two-and-a-half months they spent together every day. “We really wanted to run (our lines) over and over and over again. Partly because of our workload, so we’d end up having a little chili and wine on the weekends.

McDonagh said he often wrote with actors in mind, which he did for both times he worked with Rockwell and Farrell, and for Frances McDormand in Three Billboards, but Wild Horse Nine’s Chris was originally a blank canvas. When Malkovich came on board, he was perfect, McDonagh didn’t have to change anything.

“I don’t think I could’ve cast anyone with more gravitas or attention to detail or dexterity with both comedy and anger, but also who, in the silences, you can see his sadder thought process even when he’s seemingly doing not much at all, he’s doing everything,” McDonagh said.

It might be customary for actors and filmmakers to heap praise on each other during a press tour, but sometimes, what’s on the screen betrays them. There are films and TV shows where, when you watch them, you could tell half the people there didn’t want to be.

Not Wild Horse Nine. Its high-energy antics have an infectious feel to them. Everyone seems like they were genuinely having a good time.

“This (movie) loves being entertaining,” Posey said. “It’s generous and entertaining and all the good things that we love to go to the theatre for.

“There are not a lot of auteurs these days that get to write and direct and have their own voice, and Martin is one of them.

“I came from the 1990s indie scene and there were a lot of singular voices, so it’s exciting to be part of a movie like this, it’s just like how we used to work.”

Wild Horse Nine has advance screenings from October 30 to November 1, and then is in wide release on November 5