Is Wild Horse Nine a true story? What's real and what's made up in Martin McDonagh's spy comedy

Wild Horse Nine opened in theaters on November 6, 2026, from Searchlight Pictures, after premieres at Venice, Telluride and Toronto. It's McDonagh's first film since The Banshees of Inisherin. John Malkovich plays Chris Carlisle, a veteran CIA officer dying of cancer, and Sam Rockwell plays his partner, Lee Chesterfield. Steve Buscemi is their bureau chief, MJ, and Parker Posey is Lee's wife, Marge, who exists almost entirely on the other end of a phone line. The year is 1973, the country is Chile, and the two men have just finished a job in Santiago.

The short answer: Wild Horse Nine is not a true story. It's an original screenplay, and Chris, Lee and MJ never existed. The history they walk through did.

The coup is real

Salvador Allende, a Marxist, was elected president of Chile in 1970. On September 11, 1973, the military under Augusto Pinochet overthrew him, and Allende died in the presidential palace the same day. Thousands of people were killed or disappeared in the years that followed.

The CIA's part in it is on the record. In 1975, the U.S. Senate's Church Committee reported that the agency had spent about $8 million on covert action in Chile between 1970 and 1973, funding the opposition press and parties. According to CIA director Richard Helms's notes from a 1970 meeting, Richard Nixon's instruction was to "make the economy scream." The committee did not find evidence that the U.S. directly helped carry out the coup itself.

McDonagh had been circling the subject for a long time. "I had always been fascinated with what the CIA did in Chile in the 1970s," he told the Associated Press.

In the film, that history comes out in conversation. Chris spends time with two pro-Allende college students, Monica (Mariana di Girolamo) and Alicia (Ailín Salas), and tells them what's coming, including one line of advice: "Never let them get you in the car."

"I think we're painting way too good a picture of the CIA," McDonagh told the AP.

Chris's résumé

McDonagh gave Chris a career built from real operations. "He's been in Guatemala, overthrew that one; in the Congo, helped kill Lumumba," he told Den of Geek.

Here's how each item holds up:

• Guatemala, 1954 — real. The CIA ran the operation that toppled President Jacobo Árbenz, and the agency has since declassified its own files on it.
• The Congo, 1961 — half real. The Church Committee found that the CIA plotted to poison Patrice Lumumba and shipped poison to the Congo for the job. Lumumba was killed in January 1961 by Katangan forces, with Belgian officers present, and the poison was never used.
• Cuba, 1960–61 — real. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a CIA operation, and it failed in three days.
• Dallas, November 22, 1963 — made up. Chris's career includes the Kennedy assassination, and the agency's role in it drives the plot. No official investigation has found the CIA behind it.

That last item is where McDonagh lets the conspiracy theory run. MJ wants Chris's memoir before Chris dies, because it may reveal what happened to the rifle used in Dallas. He also wants Lee to kill Chris once he has it.

Why Easter Island

The island came first and the spies came later. "Fifteen years ago I went to Easter Island with the hope that something similar would happen to the Bruges scenario," McDonagh told the AP. He was, in his words to Den of Geek, "sort of looking for another place that could be a character in a film."

The wild horses that roam Rapa Nui are real too, and McDonagh decided early that the film needed them. "I realized they had to be part of [a movie] too," he said.

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The island and the U.S. government had history before the film arrived. From 1965 to 1970, the U.S. Air Force kept a station at Mataveri, the island's airfield, and the Americans packed up when Allende came to power. So when Chris and Lee fly in for their vacation in 1973, they land on the same airstrip their country had left three years earlier.

Shooting there was rare in its own right. "There has only been one film made there before," McDonagh told Screen Daily. That one was Kevin Reynolds' Rapa Nui in 1994. Producer Graham Broadbent's team spent about a year working with the island's local council before cameras rolled in March 2025.

What McDonagh made up

The rest is McDonagh's:

• Chris, Lee and MJ — invented. So is Chris's request that Lee kill him on Rapa Nui, away from any serious police investigation, a request Chris no longer remembers making.
• The notes — Chris's memory is going, so he leaves himself handwritten notes, including "Don't trust Lee!" Critics have compared it to Memento.
• The memoir — invented, along with everything in it.
• The title — never spoken in the film, and it isn't a CIA code name. "Yeah, I've got no idea. I like numbers, and I like horses," McDonagh told CinemaBlend.

McDonagh calls it "my most political thing." "I haven't expressed a political opinion, really, in my films, and this one's pretty out there," he told Empire.

For the record: the real rifle from Dallas never went missing. Lee Harvey Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano is held by the U.S. National Archives.

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