TORONTO – In the dark action comedy “Wild Horse Nine,” John Malkovich plays an aging man facing his own mortality and sins of the past. Which isn’t a stretch for the acting legend.
“At my age, that’s not very difficult,” Malkovich, 72, deadpanned after the film’s Sept. 14 premiere at Toronto International Film Festival.
The latest from writer and director Martin McDonagh (“The Banshees of Inisherin”) arrives in theaters Nov. 6 and casts Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, 57, as CIA operatives and close pals Chris and Lee, two guys who have dirtied their hands in global events. (And one rather infamous day in particular.)
In a tale set against the 1973
Chilean coup, the two guys take a vacation from destabilizing a democracy and head to Easter Island to look at the “big heads.” While there, they face trust issues with each other and their bosses, who’d like to keep a major national secret from going public, and also people trying to take shots at them.
McDonagh has done the buddy thing before, with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as contract killers in “In Bruges” and them together again as frenemies in “Banshees.” “You don't want to repeat exactly what you’ve done before,” the director said, and bringing politics into the narrative flips that script. “The partnership is much more grown up than anything we’ve done and probably sadder in a way because of that.”
Chris and Lee are like “an old married couple,” said Malkovich, who won the Volpi Cup for best actor at the recent Venice Film Festival. “They bicker about things and complain about this and that and want it to go this way or that way. But in this relationship, Chris has asked Lee to do something that's quite a big ask … that either takes a really committed enemy or a really great friend to do that.
“It's pretty clear that they're friends and they love each other. They care about each other. They argue about many things, but they don't really argue about killing people. They argue about if one should be eating food when doing it.”
McDonagh added that “the love John and Sam have for each other as actors and as people is very powerful.” And Rockwell said “it’s easy” to watch Malkovich do his thing: “There's so many times you see John, you see his face, and you see the vulnerability of like a 6-year-old in that face sometimes. It's beautiful.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: John Malkovich gets candid about aging in new film 'Wild Horse Nine'
