I now pronounce you … Sam Rockwell, John Malkovich and Martin McDonagh. Photograph: Giulia Parmigiani View image in fullscreen I now pronounce you … Sam Rockwell, John Malkovich and Martin McDonagh. Photograph: Giulia Parmigiani Venice film festival Interview ‘Old-timey fascism was kept secret. Now you don’t have to hide it’: Martin McDonagh, John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell on Wild Horse Nine Xan Brooks McDonagh’s latest film has Malkovich and Rockwell shooting the breeze as CIA agents in 1973 on Easter Island. They discuss grandchildren, swimming with turtles and who shot JFK
Fri 9 Oct 2026 06.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google ‘E armuffs!” says Sam Rockwell, pausing his gushing tribute mid-flow and turning to face John Malkovich on the couch. Rockwell loves Malkovich and has been discussing his work at some length. Malkovich, he says, is charismatic and dangerous, half masculine, half feminine; a unique combination and the perfect sparring partner. He’s one of the world’s finest actors and annoyingly modest to boot. “Earmuffs!” says Rockwell and pivots back towards me. “He hates hearing all this. That’s why I keep saying ‘earmuffs’.”
Malkovich frowns. “I don’t mind it,” he says.
“Hates it,” says Rockwell. “He truly hates all this stuff.”
In Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine , Malkovich and Rockwell play bickering CIA agents who may also be the best of friends. Chris and Lee are fresh from plotting the 1973 coup in Chile and are spinning their wheels on Rapa Nui, amid the crashing waves and the moai statues. They’ve seen too much and sinned too greatly and now Chris has cancer, which is hardly helping his mood. So he takes Lee aside and asks for one last big favour. “Shoot me in the head on Easter Island,” he says.
Ahead of the film’s premiere, the production team commandeer suites at an opulent Venice hotel and hand out hats and T-shirts to each new arrival. The lobby becomes a sea of merch. The harried concierge has to raise his voice to be heard. He says: “Second floor for the Six White Horses press interviews.”
McDonagh makes films that are playful and volatile, spring-loaded with violence and spiced with absurdist black comedy. Wild Horse Nine nods to In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin with its odd-couple antics and explosive side notes. But its mood is more mournful, death-haunted, with one eye on the past. McDonagh – once the upstart enfant terrible of London theatre – is now a silver-haired 56-year-old who comes at life from a different angle. “I’m getting older,” he says. “Maybe this is my first old-man movie.”
On sitting down to script Wild Horse Nine, the film-maker wrote GUILT and REGRET at the top of page one, as though setting his course with a compass and sextant. His film opens in Santiago before relocating to the South Pacific. From there it homes in on Malkovich’s CIA veteran, a leaky repository of cold war horror with his memories of the Bay of Pigs and Dealey Plaza. Chris is likely dying and wants to go out with a bang. He claims that he knows who killed JFK and is about to spill the beans.
View image in fullscreen In focus … Sam Rockwell as Lee and John Malkovich as Chris in Wild Horse Nine. Photograph: Diego Araya Corvalán/Searchlight Pictures The Kennedy assassination is the God particle of conspiracy theories. It marked the loss of US innocence, or the start of the rot of disinformation and fake news. McDonagh knows the official version and remains breezily unconvinced. “I definitely think…