David Fear
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Director Martin McDonagh with John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, on the set of 'Wild Horse Nine.' Diego Araya Corvalán/Searchlight Pictures “Hey, how come John gets a table?” Sam Rockwell asks, shooting faux-daggers out of his eyes. “Where’s my table?!” “I get a table, Sam, because I’m fucking better than you,” John Malkovich calmly replies, in what can only be described as a John Malkovich voice.
“Just because you’re fucking better than me doesn’t mean you should get a fucking table, man,” Rockwell whines, a pained look on his voice. You wonder if fisticuffs between the two award-winning actors are about to commence. Then, with perfect comic timing, Rockwell turns to the person sitting opposite him and his Wild Horse Nine costar, and pretends that he’s only just noticed the interviewer in the room. “Ohheyhow’sitgoingI’mSam,” he rapidly says, sticking out his hand as Malkovich giggles. “Welcome to the Battle of the Tables.”
Over in the corner, Martin McDonagh is watching the duo bicker like an old married couple. We’re all in a hotel room that’s been given an exotic regional makeover, the sort of movie-themed set designing that will be the background of a million junket interviews and reminds you that we’ve once again entered an awards season in hell. Crew members float in and out, gingerly stepping around boom mics and video equipment. Publicists scurry around, checking phones and murmuring among themselves about who gets lunch when. And amidst all the hullabaloo sits the British writer-director, smiling to himself. The profanity-laden back-and-forth about the injustice of one person getting a chair with a tiny stand next to it sounds like something straight out of his movies. You can practically see him taking mental notes.
Wild Horse Nine is filled with the kind of rants and banter that’s defined McDonagh’s work since his early days as a playwright, with Rockwell and Malkovich as C.I.A. agents waxing poetic about why certain countries have superior cheese, the benefit of putting surreal imagery on homemade bombs, and imagining a Western made from the perspective of a horse. His latest, which is in theaters now, mines a formula that goes as far back as The Lonesome West, the 1997 play that concludes his reputation-making “Lehane Trilogy,” and doubles as an unofficial companion piece to In Bruges, McDonagh’s 2008 debut feature about hitmen wandering around Belgium. Take two guys, give them uproariously funny dialogue that splits the middle between Harold Pinter and David Mamet, add in few dashes of shocking violence, and let everything reach a full boil.
“It’s funny you mention Pinter, because he’s always been a big influence,” McDonagh says, once things have settled down and everybody gets the table they deserve. “In Bruges is literally me doing The Dumb Waiter” — the elder writer’s play about a couple of assassins killing time before murdering their target — “and Pinter smiled when I told him that. Steal from the best, right?”
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“Didn’t some of the early drafts of this involve Pinter?” Rockwell asks.
“Oh right, they did,” McDonagh says. “I’d had gone to Rapa Nui about 15 years ago, with the idea that it might make a good backdrop for something, like Bruges was for the earlier film. I fell in love with Easter Island, as it’s commonly known, and the moai” — the giant heads that have become tourist attractions on the remote country in the southeastern Pacific — “and began playing around with the idea of two men visiting the place. For a while, they were father and son. And then at one point, they were actors, and one version opened with them discussing Pinter.”
“I once gave my father an album of Pinter’s The Homecoming as a Christmas present,” Malkovich says. “He thought it was hilarious. Every time I’d come home from college, he’d be listening to it and howling like a howler monkey. You need to send me that earlier script. Then we could do that as a play!”
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“Can you tell we’re theater nerds?” Rockwell asks.
For years, McDonagh would workshop the idea and try to form a narrative around those building blocks, but he kept running into roadblocks. Why did they end up on Rapa Nui, and not other places? What were they doing once they got there? None of it was clicking for him, so he’d put the piece away and focus his attention on other things. Every so often, he’d return to the idea, tinker with it, and put it away again. Then, roughly four years ago, he had a breakthrough, courtesy of the Clash.
Specifically, “Washington Bullets,” the track off the band’s quadruple album Sandinista. That was where a young, punk-rock-loving McDonagh first learned about the 1973 military coup in Chile that ushered in the Pinochet dictatorship and almost two decades of untold misery (“Because every cell in Chile will tell/the cries of the tortured men”). He’d long been fascinated and horrified by this C.I.A.-sponsored destabilization of a democratic election. And because of the South American country’s relative proximity to Rapa Nui, McDonagh began to imagine his duo as two men working for the agency circa ’73 who had helped set up the regime change, and had gone to Easter Island right before shit was set to go down. Suddenly, he had both stakes and a story.
McDonagh had written the part of Lee, the younger of the two agents, with Rockwell in mind; he and the actor had worked together before, on Seven Psychopaths (2012) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), and Rockwell had starred in the Broadway production of McDonagh’s play A Behanding in Spokane (2010). The two had bonded over the years thanks to, according to Rockwell, a combo of “teasing, shit-talking, and our mutual love of old movies.”
For the role of Chris — the older, terminally ill C.I.A. operative who had a long history of engineering dirty tricks during America’s political misadventures abroad, and whose plan to write his memoirs has his superiors on high alert — McDonagh ended up going out to Malkovich, who he’d been wanting to work with years. The actor loved the script. He’d also been long obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, and had previously adapted Don DeLillo’s novel Libra, which deals with conspiracy theories surrounding JFK’s death, for the stage. The fact that Chris may have been present in Dallas on that November day in 1963 intrigued the actor as well. He immediately signed on.
John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell in ‘Wild Horse Nine.’ Diego Araya Corvalán/Searchlight Pictures “I mean, these guys — they’re quintessentially American jackasses,” Malkovich notes, before referring to a sequence early in the film. “Chris is blurting out ‘We’re in the C.I.A.’ and telling those young students, ‘You’re country is fucked’ in, like, the first 10 minutes. Which is great, because that gives you a lot to play with. But you know, DeLillo referred to Kennedy’s death as ‘the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century,’ and I believe these were the kinds of guys who would have been involved in something like that. It was the kind of event, just like in Chile, that breeds mostly rage and/or nihilism, with the kind of trauma lasting over half a century that’s infiltrated everything everywhere in the country.”
“There are lots of crazy, ludicrous conspiracy theories around now,” McDonagh notes, “but you shouldn’t lump in those in with the Kennedy assassination conspiracies, because there’s so much evidence that makes everything seem really dodgy…”
“The House of Representatives found reason to believe there was more than one person involved!” Malkovich says, his voice rising.
“Which is a conspiracy,” McDonagh adds.
So is Wild Horse Nine McDonagh’s most political work since The Pillowman, his play set in a dystopian future in an unnamed country? “I think this is my most political film, for sure,” he admits. “Some of the plays touched on those aspects, but The Pillowman‘s sort of bleak. It’s set in a vague totalitarian state, and it’s about the pride of being a writer and all that stuff. But because this is about real life events, it feels much more angry in its political context. I think. Being against overthrowing a democracy — quite an easy stance to take, I think. Unless you’re in the CIA.”
There’s definitely a strain of rage that runs through dark comedy, which suggests the Oscar-winning director is still in touch with his inner Clash-loving firebrand. (“Old men can rage, too,” McDonagh jokes. “We just do it slower.”) But as Rockwell notes, “Male friendships are at the center of so much of Martin’s work, and he kept emphasizing the love between these two guys. None of this works if you don’t get the sense that my character and John’s character have a real bond, you know?”
Malkovich puts his hand on Rockwell’s shoulder and squeezes. Rockwell returns the gesture. Any arguments about tables have long been forgotten.
“All my work is really about love,” McDonagh adds. “This couldn’t be a buddy movie with, like, cool CIA guys being despicable. It had to be in every quiet moment between them, — and in every fun, nutty dialog scene — the joy of them being together one last time in Easter Island and the love underneath all of the political stuff. I’ve seen the movie with a lot of different audiences, and it’s amazing to hear the laughs and the gasps at things that happened in 1973, but feel like they’re coming very much from a 2026 viewpoint. But it really is a story about two guys who love each other.”
