Malkovich, Rockwell Star in McDonagh's JFK Conspiracy Film — SkimNews
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- Wild Horse Nine premiered at Venice to a 13-minute ovation, with John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell playing bickering CIA agents Chris and Lee, recently returned from plotting Chile's 1973 coup and now marooned on Rapa Nui amid the moai statues.
- Malkovich plays Chris, a dying CIA veteran who claims to know who killed JFK and wants to spill 'the Dallas parts' of his story before his bosses can silence him; Rockwell's Lee is the loyal sidekick.
- McDonagh, now 56 and silver-haired, called Wild Horse Nine 'my first old-man movie,' writing the words GUILT and REGRET at the top of page one of the script as a compass for the death-haunted tone.
- McDonagh said the film was 'never intended as a comment on the present-day United States,' but noted the shoot coincided with Trump's Venezuela strike, observing that 'old-timey fascism, you at least had to keep it secret. These days you don't have to hide it any more.'
- Malkovich, 72, said he hasn't voted since 1972 after George McGovern's landslide loss to Nixon, telling the interviewer 'I'm not practising' democracy, and called the Warren Commission's findings 'either flawed or a lie,' adding that '60% of the American public don't believe it.'
- Malkovich previously adapted and directed the 1994 stage version of Don DeLillo's 'Libra' about Lee Harvey Oswald and studied the Zapruder footage; McDonagh himself professes to be 'definitely a believer in the conspiracy' and zipped his lip when asked about Woody Harrelson's father and JFK rumors.
- Rockwell won an Oscar for McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and the two stars spent six weeks shooting on Rapa Nui, bonding over Chilean wine and pisco sours between marathon rehearsals of 'each scene at least a thousand times.'
Why it matters: McDonagh previously won Rockwell an Oscar for Three Billboards, and a 13-minute Venice ovation positions Wild Horse Nine as an early awards-season contender — particularly for Malkovich, whose six-decade obsession with the JFK assassination and confessed political disillusionment since 1972 give the film an off-screen edge that the source frames as inseparable from its on-screen paranoia.
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