“Wild Horse Nine”, interview with actors John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell bring Wild Horse Nine, directed by Martin McDonagh, to the Venice Film Festival 2026, where the film is in competition. At the heart of the film is the friendship between two CIA agents, set against the backdrop of Chile in 1973.

An old friendship, forged out of fear

Rockwell and Malkovich go back years, long before Wild Horse Nine. “We’re old pals,” Rockwell says. “We became pals on this movie, but we know each other from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy… we had to run a lot of lines together, so you tend to bond, because you’re terrified of not knowing your lines, and that terror brings you together.” Malkovich traces the friendship back even further, to around 2000, when the two met in New York City with Terry Kinney, before Hitchhiker’s. For him, that same bond sits at the core of the film itself. “This film is a story about a relationship,” he says. “Two best friends, one of whom asked his best friend to do something quite terrible. That’s a real burden for that friend… it’s mostly really a film about their friendship.”

History as a backdrop, and the rules of the mafia

Asked how the film speaks to politics and society today, Rockwell frames the historical setting as a narrative engine rather than a message. “I think that’s really just a dramatic platform for comedy and drama to ensue,” he says. “What it does is it sets up a danger immediately that we could possibly be killed, the two of us.” He compares the stakes to another familiar world: “That world is not unlike the mafia world. The game rules are the same.” Malkovich credits Martin McDonagh’s writing for grounding that danger in a real place and time. “Martin is a wonderful writer, both for the theater and for movies,” he says, describing how McDonagh set his two CIA agents in Chile in 1973, “when some very memorable things happened in Chile, and not in a good way.” Of the agency his character belongs to, he adds simply: “The CIA has done a lot of things, and some of them are not very nice.”

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