John Malkovich arrived at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival to receive the Golden Medallion, the festival’s career tribute, according to TheWrap. The timing was compressed: Wild Horse Nine, Martin McDonagh’s CIA black comedy, had earned a 13-minute standing ovation at its Venice world premiere the night before.
In a tribute session moderated by Vanity Fair’s Rebecca Ford, Malkovich described his complicated early relationship with film. “[I] didn’t like it very much at first,” he said. “When you do a play, you’re the editor and you have freedom. Later, I fell in love with the technical elements of cinema and what wonderful things it can do.”
Wild Horse Nine drops two CIA officers onto Easter Island in the days before the 1973 Chilean military coup. Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play the agents. The cast extends to Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits, Parker Posey, and Chilean actor Mariana Di Girolamo. On the film, Malkovich called McDonagh’s script “perfect,” adding that the director “created very elegant solutions to just about every problem in a beautifully written film.”
McDonagh carries a specific Venetian track record: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri premiered there in 2017 and earned seven Oscar nominations, including two wins. The Banshees of Inisherin followed in 2022 with nine nominations. Searchlight Pictures is set to release Wild Horse Nine in U.S. theaters on November 6, per multiple reports.
Malkovich has two Academy Award nominations and no wins. Wild Horse Nine, positioned in early analysis as the fall’s first major awards contender, offers him a late-career performance in the director’s strongest-positioned film to date. Whether the film converts its festival momentum into a first win for Malkovich is the question the rest of the season will answer.
