From the moment it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, most Oscar buzz around Wild Horse Nine has centered on John Malkovich, the odds-on favorite to win his first Oscar in Best Actor. But what about his onscreen partner, Sam Rockwell?
According to Gold Derby, Rockwell is in second place on the Best Supporting Actor leaderboard, behind Oscar-less Paul Giamatti for The Debut. Rockwell previously won that category for another Martin McDonagh collaboration, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and was nominated again the next year for Vice. If he wins his second Oscar for Wild Horse Nine, he’d become just the fifth actor to win two Academy Awards for films from the same director.
The first actor to pull off this rare double-dip was Walter Brennan, who won his first of three Best Supporting Actor trophies for Come and Get It. That film was originally directed by Howard Hawks, who was replaced by William Wyler when producer Samuel Goldwyn expressed displeasure over the rough cut. After collecting a second supporting actor prize for Kentucky, Brennan reunited with Wyler for The Westerner, which brought him his third and final Oscar.
After winning his first Best Actor trophy for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jack Nicholson earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination for James L. Brooks’ Terms of Endearment and walked away with his second Oscar. Fourteen years later, Nicholson headlined Brooks’ As Good as It Gets and clinched his third Oscar, this time in Best Actor.
Dianne Wiest was a frequent collaborator with Woody Allen and was rewarded with matching Best Supporting Actress trophies for Hannah and Her Sisters and Bullets Over Broadway, with a nomination for Ron Howard’s Parenthood sandwiched between them.
Christoph Waltz is the most recent person to complete the double dip thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Unlike Brennan, Nicholson, or Wiest, Waltz has only ever been nominated for Tarantino films, and has no unsuccessful bids.
So it’s rare, to say the least, and there are many examples of a winning actor-director pair striking out the next time at bat. Robert De Niro, for instance, earned four Oscar nominations for Martin Scorsese movies, but has only won for one: Raging Bull (Best Actor). His performances in the Scorsese-helmed Taxi Driver, Cape Fear, and Killers of the Flower Moon, however, all came up short.
Speaking of Scorsese, Joe Pesci earned all three of his Best Supporting Actor bids for films from the esteemed director. He only won for GoodFellas, losing previously for Raging Bull (1980) and subsequently for The Irishman.
Another successful Oscar whisperer has been David O. Russell, who directed Christian Bale to his first victory for The Fighter (Best Supporting Actor). Bale got KO’ed, however, when competing in Best Actor for Russell’s American Hustle.
Like Bale, Jennifer Lawrence won her first Oscar working with David O. Russell: Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook. She came close to winning a second prize for American Hustle (Best Supporting Actress), but was none too lucky despite winning the Golden Globe and BAFTA. She won a third Globe for her lead turn in Russell’s Joy, but struck out at the Oscars.
Emma Stone has had a fruitful collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos, winning her second Best Actress trophy for Poor Things (2023). Two years later, she went home empty-handed for Lanthimos’ Bugonia (Best Actress, 2025), and previously lost the supporting actress award for his The Favourite (2018).
There are even more instances this century. Daniel Day-Lewis handily won his second Best Actor prize for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, but came up short for their second collaboration, Phantom Thread.
Morgan Freeman thanked director Clint Eastwood in his Oscar speech for Million Dollar Baby, yet wasn’t so successful with his Best Actor bid for Eastwood’s Invictus.
In the 1990s, Tom Hanks struck gold with his second consecutive Best Actor trophy for Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump, but a third prize wasn’t in the cards for Zemeckis’ Cast Away.
Emma Thompson won the Best Actress Oscar on her first try for James Ivory’s Howards End, but couldn’t add a second trophy to her shelf the next year for Ivory’s The Remains of the Day.
In 1988, Dustin Hoffman won his second of two Best Actor trophies for Barry Levinson’s Rain Man. He was less successful nine years later in his bid for Levinson’s Wag the Dog, losing, funny enough, to Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets.
Sophia Loren became the first Best Actress winner for a foreign language performance in Vittorio Di Sica’s Two Women, competing unsuccessfully for that same prize three years later for Di Sica’s Marriage Italian Style.
Karl Malden was one of three acting winners for Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (Best Supporting Actor), but did not win for another Kazan collaboration, On the Waterfront, for which he, Lee J. Cobb and Rod Steiger were all nominated in the same category.
In the 1940s, Bing Crosby took home the Best Actor prize for Leo McCarey’s Best Picture-winning Going My Way, but struck out the next year for the McCarey-directed sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s.
Jennifer Jones won Best Actress for Henry King’s The Song of Bernadette, but couldn’t secure a second trophy 12 years later for King’s Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.
Going all the way back to the 1930s, Bette Davis won her second Best Actress trophy for William Wyler’s Jezebel, yet struck out subsequently for Wyler’s The Letter and The Little Foxes.
Davis’ Jezebel co-star, Fay Bainter, won the Best Supporting Actress prize that same year, and competed unsuccessfully in that same category 23 years later for another Wyler film, The Children’s Hour.
Paul Muni was a Best Actor champ for William Dieterle’s The Story of Louis Pasteur, yet couldn’t pull a Tom Hanks the next year for Dieterle’s Best Picture winner The Life of Emile Zola.
Victor McLaglen was an early Best Actor winner for John Ford’s The Informer. He earned his second nomination 17 years later for his supporting role in Ford’s The Quiet Man, but came up short.
Be it fatigue, recency bias or a long gap between nominations, Academy members just don’t feel so inclined to give a second trophy to an actor returning to the same well. Yet Rockwell has some luck working in his favor. For one thing, Malkovich is far out front in the Best Actor race. Nicholson, after all, got carried along in a Terms of Endearment sweep that benefited his co-star, Best Actress champ Shirley MacLaine, and he later won acting Oscars alongside As Good as It Gets leading lady Helen Hunt.
On the other hand, Karl Malden didn’t benefit from Marlon Brando’s all-but-assured Best Actor win for On the Waterfront, which also won Best Picture. His co-star, Eva Marie Saint, did get swept up with a Best Supporting Actress victory, and unlike Malden, she didn’t have to compete with two other On the Waterfront nominees. Rockwell has Best Supporting Actor all to himself, which couldn’t even be said for Nicholson, who had to contend against John Lithgow for Terms of Endearment.
It also doesn’t hurt that Rockwell is essentially a co-lead of Wild Horse Nine, which similarly benefited Nicholson and Waltz, both of whom could’ve just as easily competed in Best Actor for their films.
Only time will tell whether voters will be inclined to give Rockwell a second Oscar before giving Giamatti his first. If so, he’ll only have to slightly tweak his acceptance speech from nine years ago.
