Malkovich, From Montreal, Takes the Volpi Cup

A 72-year-old American actor won Best Actor at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on 12 September for a black comedy set on Easter Island, written and directed by Martin McDonagh, and he accepted the prize by video from Montreal, where he was busy filming something else.

That is the lede, and it is a complete one. John Malkovich took the Coppa Volpi for Wild Horse Nine, the only prize the film pulled out of Venice. He could not be in the Sala Grande that night because he was on another set. So he beamed in. "I am humbled to be chosen for this award, which has been given to so many wonderful actors over the past 83 iterations of the Venice Film Festival," he said, thanked the jury, thanked McDonagh for "writing this lovely screenplay and for your superb direction of it, and for gifting me with this fantastic role," and saved his warmest line for the man sitting beside him on the call: "my sidekick, the great Sam Rockwell." Then, presumably, he went back to work.

It is a small biographical tell and it is the right one to sit with. Malkovich has been a working actor for forty-odd years — Steppenwolf in the seventies, True West on Broadway, then Places in the Heart and The Killing Fields in the eighties, Dangerous Liaisons and In the Line of Fire in the early nineties, the entire Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze runs through the late nineties and oughts (Burn After Reading, Being John Malkovich — a movie in which he played, memorably, a version of himself being puppeteered by other people). He is one of the great American screen actors of his generation and he has never, by temperament or design, been a movie star. He does not do the festival circuit. He does not do the press tour. He does not seem to experience the receipt of a major prize as an event requiring his physical presence. The Volpi Cup landed on him anyway.

Wild Horse Nine is a 118-minute black comedy action thriller, a UK/US/Chile co-production, shot on Rapa Nui and in Santiago, set just before the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. The logline, per the trailer and the New York Times interview Malkovich and Rockwell gave the week after: veteran CIA officer Chris (Malkovich, terminal cancer) and his protégé Lee (Rockwell) get dispatched from Santiago to Easter Island by bureau chief MJ (Steve Buscemi). Among the moai, the two longtime partners wrestle with their pasts and present conspiracies while Chris falls in with two college students (Mariana Di Girolamo and Ailín Salas) who are not, historically speaking, supposed to be on the island at all. Tom Waits plays Chris's brother. Parker Posey plays Lee's wife. Carter Burwell did the score. Searchlight opens the film theatrically in the UK and US on 6 November 2026, which puts the theatrical run squarely in the middle of awards season.

McDonagh is the structural surprise here, and not because of the cast. The Irish playwright-turned-filmmaker's previous features — In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Banshees of Inisherin — were all Anglo-Irish in setting and sensibility. Wild Horse Nine is the first feature he has set outside that world: not just outside Ireland, but outside the British Isles and the American West, into Chilean Patagonia-by-proxy, on an island famous for giant heads and a small pre-coup CIA footprint. The Chilean co-production credit is not a tax-shuffle footnote; the cast includes two of the country's best young actors, and the film was actually shot on Easter Island and in Santiago in March–April 2025. McDonagh's usual ensemble — Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson — is absent. In its place is a different late-period McDonagh company: Rockwell, who has been in three of his movies now; Buscemi, drafted in when Mark Ruffalo dropped out; Waits, who has been waiting in the wings for this director since at least Seven Psychopaths; and Malkovich, who had never been in a McDonagh film at all.

The surprise worth sitting with is that the prize landed on Malkovich rather than on Rockwell, who is a McDonagh institutional and has been the more obviously "McDonagh-coded" actor of this group for a decade. Variety's Guy Lodge called the pair "perfectly tailored"; David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter said Malkovich was "the real revelation," his best work in years, "ranking with his finest." On the aggregator side the film is at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes (63 critics, average 8.3) and 79 on Metacritic — solid numbers, not rapturous, with the dissenters (IndieWire's David Ehrlich, B-minus: "prickly but unconvincing") grumbling that the American register flattens McDonagh's usual charm. The prize going to Malkovich, rather than to Rockwell or Buscemi or the film's only plausible Golden-Lion-adjacent bid, reads as the jury — Maggie Gyllenhaal presiding — saying something specific about the actor and not just the film.

The festival itself, for the record.

83rd Venice Film Festival
Dates 2–12 September 2026, Venice Lido
Jury President Maggie Gyllenhaal (US)
Golden Lion Woman Unknown — May el-Toukhy (Denmark/Sweden/Latvia)
Grand Jury Prize Possible Love — Lee Chang-dong (South Korea/US)
Silver Lion (Best Director) Ilya Khrzhanovsky for DAU
Volpi Cup, Best Actor John Malkovich — Wild Horse Nine
Volpi Cup, Best Actress Mathilde Arcel — Woman Unknown
Special Jury Prize NAZA — Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor
Best Screenplay Coralie Amedeo, Stéphane Brizé and Olivier Gorce, A Good Little Soldier
Golden Lion, Lifetime Achievement George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn
Opening film Ink — Danny Boyle
Closing film God Laughs — Giovanni Veronesi

A Danish-Egyptian resistance thriller as Golden Lion is a grave choice — Venice likes its winners grave, and el-Toukhy's film was, per Variety, the only one in competition directed solely by a woman, which Gyllenhaal flagged on day one and which el-Toukhy returned to in her acceptance speech. NAZA — a documentary about Gaza from the Israeli co-directors of No Other Land — was added to the competition only on 24 August and won the Special Jury Prize after a contentious jury press conference that was first cancelled and then rescheduled. The festival opened with Danny Boyle's Ink and closed with Giovanni Veronesi's God Laughs. Clooney and Burstyn picked up lifetime awards between the two. Ilya Khrzhanovsky dedicated his Silver Lion to Ukrainians fighting "in this terrible war" and to his mother, born in Ukraine just before the Nazis arrived. The fall-festivals arc — Venice, Telluride, Toronto — runs from here.

The Venice stage of awards season has its own gravitational pull. It is where the serious films arrive first and where the surprises live. The 2026 edition's surprises: a Danish resistance picture wins the Lion; a 72-year-old American character actor wins Best Actor for a black comedy he could not be bothered to fly to the Lido for; the festival's most politically charged winner, NAZA, lands the Special Jury Prize on the same night; and the lifetime awards go, jointly, to a Hollywood institution and a 93-year-old American actress who has been working since 1958. None of this is going to settle the Oscars race on its own, but it has narrowed the field in ways that will be visible by the time Searchlight starts the Wild Horse Nine press tour in October.

The small, satisfying bit is that Malkovich, who has never particularly wanted to be on this stage, won here anyway. The acceptance speech is on YouTube. He looks like a man who has somewhere else to be. He does, in fact, have somewhere else to be: a film set in Montreal, where they are shooting a different picture without a Coppa Volpi in it. That is the cleanest ending the festival gave us this year.

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