Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine lands two CIA agents on Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island, in the run-up to the 1973 military coup in Chile. The film pairs Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich as operatives whose long history of dirty tricks abroad collides with the remote island’s looming moai — and with the question of whether one of them will ever finish his memoirs.
A Story Built Around Two Men and a Remote Island
During a conversation with the director and his two stars, McDonagh traced the project back roughly fifteen years to a visit to Rapa Nui. He was drawn to the island as a possible setting, much as Bruges had served as the backdrop for his 2008 film about hitmen. Early versions of the idea changed shape: at one point the central pair were a father and son; later they were actors, and one draft opened with a discussion of Harold Pinter. None of those versions clicked until McDonagh found the story’s political engine.
That engine came from the Clash. The song “Washington Bullets,” from the band’s album Sandinista, introduced a young McDonagh to the 1973 coup in Chile and the Pinochet dictatorship that followed. He had long been appalled by the CIA-backed destabilization of a democratic election. With Chile relatively close to Rapa Nui, he began to imagine two agency men who had helped set up the regime change and had traveled to Easter Island just before events were set to unfold.
Rockwell and Malkovich as the Two Agents
Rockwell plays Lee, the younger of the two operatives. McDonagh wrote the part with the actor in mind, having worked with him on Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and having seen him star in the Broadway production of A Behanding in Spokane. The pair’s rapport, according to Rockwell, rests on teasing, shit-talking, and a shared love of old movies.
Malkovich plays Chris, the older agent, terminally ill and carrying a long record of engineering dirty tricks during American political adventures abroad. His plan to write his memoirs has his superiors on high alert. McDonagh had wanted to work with Malkovich for years. The actor was drawn to the script and to Chris’s possible presence in Dallas in November 1963. Malkovich has long been fascinated by the Kennedy assassination and had previously adapted Don DeLillo’s Libra, a novel steeped in conspiracy theories around JFK’s death, for the stage.
Politics, Rage, and the Bond Between the Men
McDonagh calls Wild Horse Nine his most political film. Unlike his play The Pillowman, which unfolds in a vague totalitarian state, this story is rooted in real events. That grounding, he says, makes the film feel angrier in its political context. He describes opposition to overthrowing a democracy as an easy stance to take — unless you happen to be in the CIA.
Malkovich characterizes the two leads as quintessentially American jackasses. He points to an early sequence in which Chris blurts out that they are in the CIA and tells young students their country is in trouble. For the actor, that kind of behavior gives the performers a great deal to work with. He also invokes DeLillo’s description of Kennedy’s death as the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century, and says he believes men like Chris would have been involved in such an event. The trauma of that period, he suggests, has lasted more than half a century and seeped into everything.
McDonagh guards a distinction between the Kennedy conspiracy theories and the wilder, more ludicrous ones circulating now. He notes that there is a great deal of evidence around the Kennedy case that makes the official account seem dubious. Malkovich jumps in to note that the House of Representatives found reason to believe more than one person was involved. McDonagh agrees that this itself is a conspiracy.
Comedy With a Real Bond at Its Center
For all its political anger, the film remains a buddy story. Rockwell stresses that male friendship sits at the center of much of McDonagh’s work, and that the director kept emphasizing the love between the two agents. Without a genuine bond between Lee and Chris, Rockwell says, none of it works. McDonagh agrees: the movie could not simply be about cool CIA men behaving despicably. The affection between them had to live in every quiet moment and every comic exchange, and in the joy of their final time together on Easter Island. He says he has watched the film with different audiences and been struck by laughter and gasps at events from 1973 that feel as if they are arriving from a 2026 vantage point. Underneath it all, he insists, the story is about two men who love each other.
