There’s a march on the streets of Central London the day I meet Mariana di Girolamo. The Chilean actor is in town for the premiere of Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine and the roads around the hotel where the press junket takes place have been largely cleared. A 1970s yellow Volvo, however, stays put. A prop for the shoot that accompanies this interview, di Girolamo poses beside it on this cold autumn morning, the hum of chanting in the distance. 

It’s an uncanny confluence of events. In the film di Girolamo, 35, plays Monica, a 20-something revolutionary who, with her Women’s Lib friend Alicia (Ailin Salas), heads from Santiago to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). They meet the film’s protagonist Chris (John Malkovich), an American CIA agent who, with his colleague Lee (Sam Rockwell), drives around the island in a yellow Ford Falcon, fulfilling a dying wish to look at “the heads”. He informs the young women that he’s there to dismantle their democracy. “It’s an interesting journey. She starts as this idealistic, optimistic young woman, a left-wing student who believes strongly in the new project of [socialist president] Salvador Allende,” says di Girolamo. “We can see that she has a lot of hope in the present, the future. We don’t always understand why she chooses to open the door to someone like Chris.” 

Set on the eve of the 1973 Chilean military coup that will derail Chilean democracy and lead to a bloody, 17-year dictatorship under Pinochet, Monica’s gradually sympathetic relationship towards the braggish, macho CIA agent comes to symbolize the tensions—youth and innocence, democracy and dictatorship, innocence and guilt—that undergird the film. Whilst I am cautious of ruining specifics of the plot, Monica’s key moment comes towards the ending in a dramatic sequence that involves a car chase, guns and a dead horse, with Chris advising Monica not to return to Santiago. As she drives off, her future is unclear. “I think she’s going back to Santiago and will be an active member of the resistance,” says di Girolamo.

It was important for Martin to choose a Chilean actress to portray this “terrible” part of the country’s history, she says. “I really appreciate that decision, because it was a decision,” says di Girolamo, who received a call asking her to audition in 2024. “It’s part of our souls. It’s an open wound. There are still mothers looking for their sons and daughters. This movie is fiction, but the context is one that we know.”

To prepare, McDonagh gathered his cast—which also includes Steve Buscemi and Parker Posey—for read-throughs at the Public Theatre in New York. Di Girolamo describes the director and playwright, whose Academy Award-nominated titles include Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) as a “magician… The script is amazing. He can create empathy for the worst characters.” 

“I needed an actress for the role of Monica who could convey a combination of innocence and optimism, yet also a steely determination when the shit hit the fan,” McDonagh writes over email. “Mariana has all that in spades, yet can show it with a lightness of touch that makes her character instantly likable. And her innate integrity, both on and off screen, is what made the film what it is—not an American Boys Club, but something deeper, more tragic, yet more hopeful too.” 

Di Girolamo was born in Santiago in 1990. “After the dictatura, in the first year of democracy,” she says. She grew up in a creative, politically-engaaged milieu—her mother and father (who has Italian heritage) are both artists, her grandfather was a director and her grandmother worked for a human rights organisation in the 1970s. Most notably, her aunt is the acclaimed actress Claudia di Girolamo, a household name in Chile for her work across theatre and television. “I grew up watching her, I really admired her,” she says. 

Rather than pursue acting initially, di Girolamo studied midwifery, although she dropped out after a year and a half. “When I started going to the hospitals I realised it wasn’t for me, but it’s a beautiful, beautiful profession,” she says. Whilst studying, she performed in a play (Juan Radrigán’s Las Brutas, about three sisters during the dictatorship). “That thing that happens in your heart and in your stomach while you’re performing, I fell in love with it.”

The experience encouraged her to apply to drama school, and from there she built out a successful career as a TV actor, acting in ‘teleseries’ (Chilean soap operas), including Río oscuro (2019), (performing alongside her aunt) and crime drama La Jauría (2020). “It taught me a lot about discipline. When you’re a lead actress, you have 12 scenes per day, sometimes from Monday to Saturday, you work with the same people for at least 8 months,” she says. “It also gave me a lot of connection with people, who watch you while they are drinking tea or eating marraquetas [bread rolls].”

Her first film role was opposite Gael García Bernel as the titular character in Ema. Directed by Pablo Larraín (an executive producer on Wild Horse Nine), he had seen her soap opera work and cast her as a dancer and dysfunctional mother. It premiered in Venice in 2019 to critical acclaim. “It was a very special moment in my career. I just fell in love with cinema,” she recalls. She returned to Venice with Leonardo Medel’s La Verónica (about another complicated mother) in 2020. I note that, in keeping with a recurring joke in Wild Horse Nine, unlike John Malkovich’s Chris, Mariana has been to the Floating City at least three times. “I didn’t want to sound arrogante,” she jokes, “but this was not my first time in Venice.” 

Di Girolamo lives in Santiago with her husband, who is a musician, and her infant daughter (she gave birth earlier this year). Whilst she vacations in the southern island of Chiloé, shooting Wild Horse Nine was her first time on the historic island of Rapa Nui. “It’s not something you do every year as a Chilean. It’s a unique place, with strong energy, three volcanoes, it’s very green, full of wild horses,” says the actor. In her downtime, she also made a new group of friends who live on the island. “It’s a very welcoming place, but they are very protective of their land. The moai [totems] are sacred. If you go there, the invitation is to respect the place as they do.” 

Beyond acting, di Girolamo describes her acting idols as Renate Reinsve, Sandra Hüller, Tilda Swinton and Daniel Day-Lewis, whilst also giving a nod to Los Javis (La Bola Negra directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi), Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem. “Estamos a la moda,” says the actor of her fellow Hispanic stars. She adds that she’s excited and nervous for the Santiago screening of Wild Horse Nine later in the month. “I think it will be really emotional,” she says. “I’m so proud of being Chilean right now.” 

This year has been “transformador,” she says pensively. The film indeed marks an international breakout for the actress, who is set to travel on the Awards campaign with the film right until the Oscars ceremony next year. “It’s a big film—with legends and festivals,” she says. “I’m experiencing a revolution in my own life.”  

Wild Horse Nine is in UK cinemas from 6th November.