It might seem surprising that an actor as monumental as John Malkovich has never won an Oscar. There have been some close calls: nominated for supporting roles in 1985’s Places in the Heart and 1994’s In the Line of Fire, before Spike Jonze’s 1999 feature debut Being John Malkovich cemented Malkovich’s eccentric position in popular culture while earning Best Screenplay and Best Director nominations for Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.

Maybe it took working with British director Martin McDonagh on Wild Horse Nine to make him a major contender for 2027.

McDonagh himself was nominated for best original screenplay for In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin, but his films also have a tendency to set his actors up for major awards.

After winning in Venice Frances McDormand was awarded the best actress Oscar for Three Billboards, while Malkovich’s Wild Horse Nine co-star Sam Rockwell took out a best supporting actor Oscar for his role as a racist cop in three Billboards.

Malkovich’s Oscar fate is still to be decided, but after taking out Venice’s Volpi Cup for best actor there’s little doubt that he is a current best actor favourite for his portrayal of a CIA operative.

In his Venice acceptance speech, the 72-year-old Malkovich thanked the audience for the film’s rousing reception, and McDonagh for “writing a lovely screenplay and the superb directing of it and gifting me with this fantastic role.”

Malkovich had loved previous McDonagh scripts, but his busy schedule prevented him from considering them.

“When this one came around, I decided absolutely I would do it, and thankfully I didn’t have anything standing in the way,” he said in Venice.

At this year’s Zurich Film Festival McDonagh said he wanted to grant Malkovich’s character the broadest palette of emotions. “You know that John can do comedy, he can do rage and he can do contemplative, quiet stuff,” he explained. “But I’m making sure all those things are together in one package.”

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Malkovich and Rockwell play Chris and Lee, two ageing CIA agents, seasoned killers and forever bickering best friends, who are dispatched by their boss MJ (Steve Buscemi) to travel from Santiago to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) just before the 1973 Chilean coup.

Chris had a hand in shady U.S. intelligence interventions in Guatemala, Congo, Indonesia, Cuba, and even the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, but now that his health is failing he is re-evaluating life – while maintaining his wry sense of humour.

“Something I’ve been thinking about since my teens was the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende,” McDonagh said during the Venice festival.

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“So to have that as a backdrop to the story was most important, and I realised then that the story could be about one of the guys experiencing guilt and regret over his life with these people in the CIA and all the things he’d done. That took the story away from it being a simple comedy, to something much deeper and sadder and darker.”

He says Wild Horse Nine is the most political film he’s made. “I’m always questioning, even in my less political films. I like to question authority, or what we’re being told.”

One of the telling scenes that appealed to Malkovich is when Chris and Lee meet two Chilean student activists and Allende supporters, Monica (Mariana Di Girólamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas), at the Santiago airport.

“For some reason, these two guys, who are kind of dicks, think these very young, attractive girls would be interested in them and their bullshit – which is kind of insanity. But it’s a very delicate thing that Martin was trying to do, that he takes some proprietary interest in Mariana’s character.

“She’s a kind of symbol of what they’re about to corrupt,” he says. “Chris is trying to convince her all is lost. The barbarians are not at the gate; they’re inside the town, and they’re in the process of eating everyone.”

Malkovich describes his and Rockwell’s characters as “an old married couple, theatre queens”. “People who know each other very well, and that means the things that irritate you about someone you know very well are not going to change at all. They’ll just become more heightened.”

“It’s a great relationship,” adds Rockwell, who is seated alongside Malkovich for our interview. “Lee’s trying to help his friend out, and he’s really like a hand grenade that’s about to go off.”

Rockwell adds that Malkovich has “the gift of fury”, comparable to the late Gene Hackman.

“At one point during rehearsal Martin politely said, ‘John, could you turn up the heat a little bit on that?’ And of course, John said, ‘Yeah, yeah, fine.’ And then he just exploded, the way you’ve seen him in In the Line of Fire and so many other movies and it was really exciting. I looked at Martin and we were like, ‘Oh yeah, here we go! We’ve got front row seats’. For me this was a real treat.”

"The barbarians are not at the gate; they’re inside the town, and they’re in the process of eating everyone."

The naturally mild-mannered Malkovich notes that it’s the director’s job to advise how far he can go. “Chris is on a certain level, you would think very capricious. But I don’t think he is really. He’s someone who has a way of looking at things where it’s fine to kill people, but not when they’re eating, and a lot of other things.

“Normal people would look at it and say, ‘Do you really think it’s fine?’ He does. Otherwise he can be like a big child and be very suspicious. He says he didn’t have friends until Lee came along, and I think that’s probably true.”

A decade in the planning, Wild Horse Nine is only the second film to be shot on Easter Island after 1994’s Rapa Nui, directed by Kevin Reynolds and produced by Kevin Costner.

“It was a beautiful backdrop for the film,” Malkovich says. “It’s a fantastic place to shoot – obviously it’s a very good place to concentrate because there aren’t tonnes of distractions, except the turtles, I guess. And the people are nice.”

“They had to ship all the equipment on a boat,” Rockwell adds. “I kept expecting King Kong to come out.”

When I suggest that Malkovich’s monumental stature as a creative has begun to resemble Easter Island’s towering Moai stone figures seen in the film, he responds with droll self-deprecation.

“And I have a big head,” he quips.

Rockwell interjects: “I think I have a small head but a huge ego. Does that help as well?”

McDonagh also flew Buscemi and Parker Posey (who plays Margie, Lee’s wife) to the island – even if they only filmed off camera there. It was around the time that Rockwell and Posey’s turn in the latest season of The White Lotus hit screens, and Buscemi says Rockwell kept his Emmy-nominated turn in the series quiet until his episodes aired.

“I was working with Sam one day, and that night and we were watching the latest episode, and I see Sam come on,” he recalls. I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ And then I see him in the makeup chair the next morning and he said he didn’t want to say anything.”

Posey was thrilled by the show’s popularity on the island. “I took a photograph at a church with an eight-foot-five man with bones and a whole headdress,” she says.

While Malkovich and Rockwell’s onscreen characters might not have the welfare of locals at heart, Buscemi notes how happy the Island’s community was to host the production.

“The producers really took care,” he says. “Because a movie hadn’t shot there in like 40 years, and with the last movie the locals were not very happy with the way they were treated – or the way the island was treated.”

Wild Horse Nine opens the Adelaide Film Festival on October 14 and also screens on October 20. It releases nationally on November 5.