Malkovich's CIA Agent Claims JFK Truth in Wild Horse Nine — SkimNews
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- Wild Horse Nine premiered at Venice with a 13-minute ovation, casting Malkovich and Rockwell as bickering CIA agents newly exiled to Rapa Nui after helping orchestrate the 1973 Chile coup.
- Malkovich's character Chris, a cold-war veteran haunted by Bay of Pigs and Dealey Plaza, claims to know who killed JFK and wants to publish his memoirs before cancer kills him — a prospect his CIA bosses find alarming.
- McDonagh openly professes JFK conspiracy belief, saying "I don't believe [Oswald was] the lone gunman for a second," and mimes zipping his lip when asked about Woody Harrelson's father's rumored involvement.
- Malkovich himself directed a 1994 stage adaptation of Don DeLillo's "Libra" about Oswald, studied the Zapruder footage, and concluded the Warren Commission findings were "flawed or a lie" — he hasn't voted since McGovern's 1972 landslide loss.
- McDonagh reframes the film as inadvertent political commentary: the shoot coincided with Trump's Venezuela strike, and he argues modern ops are "brazen" where "old-timey fascism... you at least had to keep it secret," naming Nixon, Bush, and Johnson as worse presidents than Trump.
- Rockwell and Malkovich rehearsed each scene "about a thousand times," spent six weeks on Rapa Nui drinking pisco sours between takes, and earned Malkovich early awards buzz at 72.
Why it matters: McDonagh uses a CIA buddy movie built around the JFK assassination to argue American state violence has migrated from covert coups (Chile, Bay of Pigs) to overt, unapologetic operations, and his co-star Malkovich — an admitted non-voter since 1972 — is an unusually credible vessel for that cynicism, lending the conspiracy premise thematic weight beyond genre thrills.
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