'Wild Horse Nine' Should Win an Oscar for Its Signet Rings

Wild Horse Nine is a Western. Sort of. Yes, Martin McDonagh’s new film is set on Easter Island (known locally as Rapa Nui) in the Pacific Ocean. And yes, this is the 1970s, with John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell playing CIA operatives who take a break from plotting a coup in Chile to tour the stone moai heads.But there are also—as the title suggests—a lot of wild horses about, plus a cameo from Tom Waits in a shack in Colorado’s Monument Valley and a hell of a lot of Western accessories. Rockwell’s turquoise belt buckle and cowboy hat almost had me wanting to jump back in time and become a paid-up member of the American deep state. And the big signet rings with chunky stones everyone’s wearing? Look, if you really need me to fictionally assassinate JFK and frame Lee Harvey Oswald for it, I’ll step up.Costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh, who worked with McDonagh on The Banshees of Inisherin, had fun outfitting everyone in colorful shirts and flared trousers. “I really liked the way men dressed in the ’70s,” she says. “There was almost a dandyish quality to them.” But it’s the accessories that really makes the characters. “Anytime you’re doing a fitting [for] a male actor,” she explains, “you’re putting on the shirt and the trousers and they’re like, ‘Mmm, okay.’ Then you put on that belt, you give him a Cuban heel and a cowboy hat and a ring, suddenly they start to stand differently. They get the whole swagger. A costume is never finished until you have all those details.”Courtesy of Searchlight PicturesCourtesy of Searchlight PicturesThis is a film with a lot of those details. Rockwell’s cowboy hat, for example, was custom-made by the London milliner Sophie Lamb, who's worked on films like Phantom Thread. His belt buckle is in the traditional Navajo style of the American West: sterling silver with turquoise inlay, which Mhaoldomhnaigh says she “probably got it on Etsy.” That said, she does a lot of IRL trawling on London’s Portobello Road, too. “I really wanted Sam to wear a chain, but when we put it on with the whole outfit, it felt like overkill—like we were decorating a Christmas tree. You have all those things and then you have to pull back a little bit.”There’s other great gear in the vein of brash, peacocking men of action. “It’s a very American look,” says Mhaoldomhnaigh. Steve Buscemi, who plays the CIA’s South American boss, is in Coblens glasses with gradated lenses, and a ’70s watch from Rotary. Rockwell has a chunky gold watch from Pierre Jacquard. Malkovich, whose character is still stuck in his ’60s glory days, has this whole pork-pie hat thing happening.Courtesy of Searchlight PicturesCourtesy of Searchlight PicturesBut what really gets me going is the rings. Pretty much everyone—including Waits, who plays Malkovich’s hippie brother—has got these chunky rings on, and of a kind we don’t necessarily associate with gray-suitness of the American establishment today. It’s more dandyish, as Mhaoldomhnaigh puts it: “I was a child in the ’70s,” she says. “I always remember older men wearing those type of rings. My dad had one.”She was on the lookout for designs which matched her memories, both vintage and new—Malkovich’s ring, which is gold with a black onyx stone, was “actually bought in Liberty,” she says, referring to the famous British department store.“Martin’s films are always a little bit heightened,” the costume designer says. “That’s part of the fun of it, being able to create these slightly heightened characters.” And dressing up those characters means you can have fun, as McDonagh does, in mocking their big egos. Even so, I’m being deadly serious when I say I’d ransack Mhaoldomhnaigh’s props box any time.A version of this story originally appeared in British GQ.