The unbearable lightness of being John Malkovich

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Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich on Easter Island in ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán. Welcome to Wild Horse Nine, the latest film from the gloriously perverse imagination of Martin McDonagh, a filmmaker who’s made something of a speciality of placing morally compromised men, in unusually dramatic relationships, in exceptionally beautiful locations and watching them unravel.

“Where’s the cheese?” … Director and filmmaker Martin McDonagh

In a previous McDonagh movie, In Bruges (2008), Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson were two hitmen marooned in a picturesque Belgian city, contemplating guilt, punishment and the architectural merits of medieval Europe. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) gave us grief, vengeance and a particularly combustible Sam Rockwell, while The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) turned a fallout between two friends on an isolated Irish island into a magnificent study of masculine stubbornness and self-destruction.

Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich in ‘Wild Horse Nine’. © 2026 Searchlight Pictures. Now McDonagh has taken his fascination with difficult men, difficult friendships and impossible moral choices to Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island, that strange speck of volcanic land in the Pacific Ocean, 3,500km west of mainland Chile.

“These two characters have done heinous things. But, exploring that without judgement is the most important thing.” … Director and filmmaker Martin McDonagh

The year is 1973. Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, is living on borrowed time. The United States, deeply uncomfortable with the prospect of a successful socialist government in its geopolitical backyard, has been working to undermine him. On September 11, a military coup will overthrow Allende and usher in Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship. American involvement in destabilising Chile is well documented, although the film’s particular operatives and their exploits are fictional.

Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas in ‘Wild Horse Nine’. © 2026 Searchlight Pictures. Against this distinctly unpromising political backdrop, two veteran CIA agents, Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell), are dispatched from Santiago to Easter Island by their boss, MJ (Steve Buscemi). Chris is terminally ill, increasingly preoccupied with his past and entertaining some alarming ideas about how his future should unfold. Lee, his longtime partner, is expected to accommodate an extraordinary request. Meanwhile, Chris’s unexpected friendship with two rebellious young women threatens to complicate things further.

Mariana di Girolamo and John Malkovich in ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán. It’s a political thriller, a black comedy, a meditation on death and a love story of sorts between two men whose principal shared accomplishment has been taking people out, in the most literal of ways.

At the film’s centre is Malkovich, an actor who’s spent five decades making the peculiar seem perfectly reasonable.

John Malkovich in ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán. At 72, Malkovich remains one of cinema’s most fascinating presences. That unmistakable voice, simultaneously languid and threatening; the measured delivery that suggests he’s already considered every possible outcome of a conversation and found most of them disappointing; the ability to make a raised eyebrow feel like a declaration of war.

John Malkovich armed and dangerous in ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán, In Dangerous Liaisons, he made seduction look like a sophisticated form of cruelty, and it was. In Being John Malkovich, he gamely surrendered his own identity to one of cinema’s most absurd premises in a film about the human yearning to escape oneself, inhabit another person’s skin and gaze into the inner lives of celebrities. In Wild Horse Nine, he plays a man who’s spent a lifetime exercising power over other people’s destinies, only to discover that he has little control over his own.

When I join Malkovich, Rockwell, McDonagh and their fellow cast members for a conversation about the film, it becomes apparent that the relationship between Chris and Lee is less a conventional Hollywood partnership than a long, dysfunctional marriage.

“They’re two people who know each other well,” Malkovich explains. “And are capable of visiting violence on people clinically and dispassionately. They’re two people who love each other but drive each other apesh*t.”

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell in ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán. The complication, Malkovich continues, is that one man has asked the other to do “about the biggest ask you can ask of a friend”. The tension is not merely whether that request will be honoured, but when, where and what it will cost them both.

The film’s moral terrain is consequently far more complicated than the traditional business of separating heroes from villains. These men have committed appalling acts, as their jobs, without considering themselves appalling people. They are loyal, affectionate, funny and sometimes touching. They are also professional instruments of political violence.

Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich as CIA agents up to no good on Easter Island. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán. McDonagh is interested in that contradiction. “These two characters have done heinous things,” he says. “But, exploring that without judgement is the most important thing.”

His objective, he says, was to discover their humanity without pretending that their humanity excuses their actions. It’s an important distinction. Being charming doesn’t absolve a person of being monstrous. History is littered with charming monsters.

Steve Buscemi and Sam Rockwell ride together in ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán. For Malkovich, the quality of McDonagh’s writing was what made the project irresistible. “I’m not much for spontaneous improvisation,” he says dryly, adding that, as someone who also writes scripts, he likes to hear his own dialogue performed as written, if only to satisfy his curiosity. He says he’s rewritten enormous portions of other films when they needed it. But he approved of McDonagh’s screenplay. “I read it, I understood it, I knew it was good.”

Director Martin McDonagh works with John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell on the set of ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán. Malkovich’s reverence for writers goes back to his theatrical beginnings with Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Arthur Miller. He remembers once suggesting to Miller that Death of a Salesman could be improved by removing a particular bedroom scene. Miller disagreed. The scene survived. “Call me arrogant,” he remarks.

Rockwell, who previously worked with McDonagh on Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is equally effusive about the director. “He’s an anomaly,” he says. “One of the great talents who sees things with the kind of X-ray vision that most of us don’t have.”

Tom Waits in a scene from ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Justin Lubin. He places McDonagh alongside playwrights Paddy Chayefsky and Pinter. Asked how he and Malkovich established their extraordinary on-screen chemistry, Rockwell offers a succinct explanation: “It was acting.”

Malkovich, considerably more expansive, describes the endless preparation involved in finding the precise emotional temperature of a scene. Actors might explore a dozen different possibilities in rehearsal, he explains, but filmmaking demands decisions. There simply isn’t time to spend 12 hours discussing a scene over a martini. “A 12-hour martini sounds pretty good,” Rockwell interjects.

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán. Malkovich has an intriguing philosophy about the relationship between actor and director. “When you’re in a movie, you’re a figure in someone else’s dream. It’s not your dream.” The actor’s responsibility, he says, is to understand the role he occupies in that dream, rather than attempt to commandeer it. “McDonagh is the perfect guide.”

Parker Posey as Marge in ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Justin Lubin. The dream in question began some 15 years ago, when McDonagh first visited Rapa Nui and recognised its cinematic potential. He experimented with various stories involving two men, initially imagining a father-and-son relationship. Nothing worked until he connected the island to Chile’s political history. Once he began thinking about the CIA’s involvement in undermining Allende’s government, everything fell into place.

It’s a history with uncomfortable contemporary echoes. Declassified American documents reveal the extent of Washington’s covert campaign against Allende, including the Nixon administration’s efforts to encourage his overthrow.

Director Martin McDonagh with Tom Waits on the set of ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Justin Lubin. But McDonagh insists that he didn’t want to deliver a political sermon. “I don’t like films that are didactic or polemical or a lecture,” he says. “But comedy can lure an audience into confronting subjects they might otherwise avoid.”

It’s an effective strategy. People who wouldn’t voluntarily attend a two-hour lecture on American interventionism might happily spend the same time watching Malkovich and Rockwell insult each other against a beautiful Pacific backdrop. Then, without noticing, they find themselves contemplating the moral consequences of imperial power.

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell share a laugh. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán. Steve Buscemi, Sam Rockwell, and John Malkovich in ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán. The island itself becomes a character. Its enormous moai statues, created by the Indigenous Rapa Nui people, have watched generations come and go. Against their ancient, impassive presence, the self-importance of two American intelligence agents seems a bit ridiculous.

McDonagh says he sees the location as an extension of Chris’s predicament. “He’s at the end of the world and at the end of his life,” he says, with the moai observing his guilt. The physical isolation also intensifies the relationship between the men. There is nowhere to hide, geographically or emotionally.

Steve Buscemi and Sam Rockwell. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán. For Chilean actress Mariana di Girolamo, who plays one of the rebellious students the hitmen encounter, the island was unlike anywhere she had experienced. “We were in this tropical island full of wild horses. Volcanoes, strong energy,” she recalls. She was particularly moved by the Rapa Nui people’s attachment to their language, culture and land.

John Malkovich and Mariana di Girolamo. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. Filming there was a big undertaking. McDonagh’s production team had to transport everything from mainland Chile, including cameras, equipment and period cars. Some vehicles arrived late, forcing adjustments to the shooting schedule. But the isolation brought unexpected benefits. Cast and crew stayed together, rehearsed in restaurants and bars, and encountered their filming locations on their daily walks.

Malkovich loved it. “I thought it was a perfect place to shoot a movie because it really lent itself to work and concentration.” For an actor whose career has taken him across continents, theatrical traditions and a variety of roles, the opportunity to immerse himself in a character was clearly appealing.

Sam Rockwell as Lee in ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. There is something particularly affecting about watching Malkovich, an actor whose performances so often suggest intellectual superiority and control, inhabit a man whose memory and body are letting him down. Chris has spent his life believing that history is something powerful men manufacture. Now he must confront the possibility that history will remember him rather differently from how he thinks of himself.

Wild Horse Nine finds its most interesting tension here: between the desire for redemption and the inconvenient fact that redemption can’t simply be ordered like room service.

The younger Chilean characters offer a different perspective on the past. For them, the political upheaval isn’t a collection of classified operations or geopolitical calculations. It’s their future. Di Girolamo hopes the film will encourage audiences to investigate that history, including the fate of Chilean singer and activist Víctor Jara, murdered in the aftermath of the coup.

Sam Rockwell in ‘Wild Horse Nine’. Photo by Searchlight Pictures/Diego Araya Corvalán. The contrast between youthful idealism and ageing cynicism is central to McDonagh’s story. His American agents have spent their careers interfering in other people’s futures. Now one of them is running out of his own.

Buscemi, meanwhile, provides another variety of moral discomfort as the agents’ superior, MJ, a man attempting to maintain authority over two subordinates who have little respect for their superior. “I don’t get to play a boss often,” he says, “especially the boss of two guys who really don’t want you to be their boss.”

Ultimately, Wild Horse Nine is concerned with being human: our capacity for affection and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, regret and self-deception. It asks whether a lifetime of terrible decisions can be redeemed by a final act of decency and whether friendship can survive the burden of knowing precisely who someone is.

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell. Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. Malkovich’s answer to what makes such complicated characters possible is characteristically simple. “It’s everything,” he says about the veracity of McDonagh’s writing. “You can’t bring something that isn’t there, that isn’t in the cupboard.”

Rockwell adds,“You can’t open and close the cupboard doors, hoping something worthwhile will miraculously appear.”

At which point McDonagh interrupts. “Where’s the cheese?”

“Where’s the cheese?” Malkovich repeats, delighted.

And there, perhaps, is the entire McDonagh philosophy in an absurd comment. Life is cruel, history is bloody, death is inevitable and mankind’s moral cupboard is frequently bare. But thankfully there’s always someone like McDonagh who’s looking for the cheese.

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