John Malkovich, a world-weary CIA man in 'Wild Horse Nine,' prefers life
on the road
[November 05, 2026]
By JAKE COYLE
NEW YORK (AP) — In Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine,” John Malkovich
plays an itinerant CIA officer, Chris, weary from his travels. But Chris
has got nothing on Malkovich's miles.
Over his 50-year career, Malkovich has performed live in 47 countries,
by his count. He’s played a serial killer in Hamburg. He’s directed “Les
Liaisons Dangereuses” in Paris. He’s done George Bernard Shaw in
Bulgaria.
“It’s probably not by an accident that the first film I ever developed
was called ‘The Accidental Tourist,’” Malkovich says, chuckling. “It
just kind of happened and I went along with it. It’s a big world.”
Malkovich is best known for his screen credits, including “Empire of the
Sun,” “Of Mice and Men,” “In the Line of Fire,” “Being John Malkovich”
and the new “Wild Horse Nine,” in which he plays a dying CIA man on
Easter Island who, after a lifetime of toppling governments and carrying
out assassinations, is increasingly eager to spill the beans. The
performance — mordant, droll, elegiac — is a big-screen apogee for
Malkovich. He's favored to win what would be his first Academy Award.
But if Malkovich is experiencing a moment of public celebration at 72,
it’s also a reminder that he has, if not eschewed the spotlight, seldom
sat still long enough for it to linger. Instead, Malkovich has preferred
an ever-moving, endlessly curious life on the road.
“I’m a worker, and this isn’t part of my work,” Malkovich said in an
interview on his way through New York. “I rarely go to openings. I
rarely see a film I’m in. I’m rarely asked to promote because I’m
already gone.”
An Oscar campaign, in between sojourns in Mexico and Japan
Malkovich was momentarily stationary on a recent, bright fall day. He
wore a hat, not unlike his character’s in “Wild Horse Nine,” to shield
his bald head from the hotel air conditioning. The threat of getting
sick was his biggest worry. Days earlier, he had performed spoken word
in Mexico City. By the time “Wild Horse Nine” arrives in theaters
Friday, Malkovich will be in Japan, directing a play.
“I’ll go to Japan — I don’t speak a word of it. I directed
‘Leopoldstadt' in Latvian, don’t speak a word of Latvian. Well, I had
five or six words, the main one was ‘cinnamon roll,’ which is two
words,” Malkovich says. “I’ve just been constantly learning.”
Those experiences have taught Malkovich that countries may differ, but
audiences are generally the same. They come to be compelled or amused.
Mostly, he says, they come for catharsis. And he keeps giving it to
them.
“You find yourself in Monte Carlo or Oklahoma City or Salé or Porto
Alegre,” Malkovich says. “It’s 4 a.m., you’re up. It’s 5 a.m., you’re
already in a car. This is thousands of mornings for me. I could even say
maybe it’s most mornings. You don’t know anyone and you may never be
back. This is my life on the road.”
Malkovich has watched some of his contemporaries lose their enthusiasm
for acting, but he considers himself more interested now than when he
was in his 20s. In the late 1970s, Malkovich was a charter member of the
Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. Performances in plays like “True
West” and “Death of a Salesman” made him one of his generation's most
thrilling stage performers.
“You should learn something every day,” he says. “Somebody asked me to
do a fashion line. I’ve done 24 collections. What do I know about it?
(Expletive) all. The point is to learn about it, it seems to me.”
Over the last two decades, Malkovich has increasingly worked with
classical music performers in hybrid stage shows that pair spoken word
with orchestras and chamber ensembles. In one, the satirical “The Music
Critic,” violinist Aleksey Igudesman performs classical masterworks
alongside Malkovich’s deadpan readings of old, now-comical critical
pans.
“I work in classical music a lot because I can help sell tickets,”
Malkovich says. “OK, and what do I get from that? I get the pleasure of
being on stage with unbelievably beautiful music performed by
unbelievably well-trained and gifted musicians.”
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John Malkovich poses for a portrait to promote "Wild Horse Nine" in
New York on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026. (Photo by Victoria Will/Invision/AP)
 Malkovich’s travels have sometimes
run into local politics. Earlier this year, he pulled out of
performing “The Music Critic” in Tel Aviv, Israel, after a press
release falsely attributed quotes to him. Two years ago in Bulgaria,
a Malkovich-directed production of Shaw’s anti-war comedy “Arms and
the Man” became a target of far-right nationalist protesters who
physically assaulted theatergoers.
“I think that’s all unfortunate and pretty goofy, all in all, and
had nothing to do with the play,” he says.
Choosing the stage over Hollywood
Being on the road so often has inevitably meant sacrifice. Unable to
find time in his international schedule, Malkovich twice before
turned down McDonagh. But McDonagh, the playwright-turned-filmmaker
of “In Bruges” and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” persisted — even if
Malkovich’s intellect was intimidating.
“I was scared the first time I had a Zoom with him,” McDonagh says.
“But I knew that in the silent moments you’d see acres of sorrow and
regret when he’s seemingly not doing anything — when he’s just
looking out of a window or listening to a Dictaphone or smoking a
cigarette. That, I think, is the heart of the movie.”
When he read McDonagh’s script, which touches on CIA involvement in
both John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the military coup in Chile,
Malkovich found it paralleled some of his previous work: a stage
adaptation of Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and a piece based on Roberto
Bolaño’s “Nazi Literature in the Americas.”
“Those are the two bookends of this: Two huge national,
international traumas that happened in the TV age and which are the
kind of magnets that keep crushing these characters and their
movement through life,” he says.
Malkovich could have easily drifted more toward movie-star
iconography. It wouldn’t have been hard for him, after “Being John
Malkovich,” to trade more directly on his unique screen presence and
his halting, idiosyncratic line deliveries. It’s a path that
Malkovich knowingly avoided, preferring to shape his own artistic
life than wait around for a good part to show up.
At the Telluride Film Festival premiere of “Wild Horse Nine,”
Malkovich ran into the producer Kathleen Kennedy, who produced
1987’s “Empire of the Sun,” directed by Steven Spielberg. He hadn’t
seen her since.
“I probably haven’t seen Steven in all those years. OK, I had a
different life. I went a different way. But without any sort of
malice or distaste,” says Malkovich. “It’s just that a lot of things
interested me and I pursued most of them with some degree of vigor
and interest, as I do everything.”
“I always accepted in my life that doing what you want, there’s a
price to that. And that’s fine. I never minded that price at all,”
Malkovich says. “I’ve done exactly what I wanted, more or less.”
Malkovich grew up in a rural coal-mining town in Illinois. The big
claim to fame, he says, is its proximity to a maximum-security
prison. This month, like many months, he’ll be on the other side of
the globe, directing a troupe of actors in a language he doesn’t
understand.
“I often to put my youngest granddaughter to sleep by singing ‘One
Too Many Mornings’ by Bob Dylan,” Malkovich says. “One too many
mornings / And a thousand miles behind.”
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