How Josh O’Connor Became the Thinking Man’s Leading Man

In summer 2024, in the weeks after Challengers had made the world realize that he’s a movie star, Josh O’Connor could be found making a home for himself in a small village in the Cotswolds, a hundred miles or so away from the noise. (He’d rather we didn’t name the exact area, because the last time he did that in an interview, mail started showing up—some letters, some books. Which was nice and all, but a little unsettling, as he hadn’t actually given his address.)

In a rare bit of downtime off the back of two intensive press tours, he tended to his garden. He mowed the lawn, which had turned straw-like in the heat. He deadheaded the roses that had sprouted alongside the gravel path to his front door. He got on his knees and ripped weeds from the dirt with his bare hands. At one point, his brother came to visit, and the two of them dug a small pond in the grass a few feet from the house’s entrance.

How did they do it? “We dug a fucking hole,” O’Connor says, standing over the pond in mid-August of this year with his hands on his hips, surveying it with just a modicum of pride. They laid down some waterproof membrane and filled it with tap water. Then they used some of the turf to build a low barrier around it and planted some foliage to provide shade. A year later, the pond is peppered with moss and lily pads. “It looks like it’s been there forever,” he says, and he’s right. When he gets back here—and he doesn’t get back as much as he’d like—he enjoys sitting in front of this pond with a cup of tea and watching wildlife make use of his handiwork: dragonflies hovering above it, frogs splashing in and out. “So, frogs just find water,” he says, “I learned that.”

A little earlier today, O’Connor picked me up from a two-platform, no-frills railway station in a green Volvo. We drove along winding roads that opened up to tear-jerking views of rolling hills, past cute pubs and shops and people who say hello when you walk past them in the street, and finally up to O’Connor’s perch—a stone cottage that looks like the bottom half of an old church, but is actually a former servants’ residence for the massive house next door. In the car, O’Connor excitedly described what he loves about the area like a tour guide on commission, but on this particular Saturday, he didn’t need to. I had boarded a train in overcast London and emerged to gentle sunshine. It was like he’d orchestrated it.

O’Connor grew up in the area. His family live nearby, and many of his old classmates are still “hanging around.” But the pull goes deeper than that. “I was trying to explain it to a friend recently,” he says. “It’s not even nice. It’s essential… I really have this need in my soul to be private and quiet. It’s just having that little bit of peace, you know?”

The truth is, in the three years since he bought his countryside sanctuary, Josh O’Connor has barely been home at all. He is in the middle of the greenest patch of his career, and while he bears no trace of it, his garden does. The night before I visited, he had returned after a month of filming Jack of Spades in Scotland with Joel Coen, to a tree half-full of rotten figs, which had ripened earlier than usual because of the eerily warm summer. He still feels bad that he didn’t get a chance to tell his neighbors to help themselves while he was away.

He’s got four movies coming out in the next few months. The History of Sound is a romantic drama he made with his close friend Paul Mescal, which makes All Of Us Strangers look like Heartstopper, and then he’s in two quiet indies—as a godawful art thief in The Mastermind, and in Rebuilding as a rancher who loses everything in a wildfire. There’s also the biggest movie of his career so far, Wake Up Dead Man, the third installment in Netflix’s crazily popular Knives Out series, which drops in December. You’ll remember the previous outing, because—and I would bet a worrying amount of money on this—it was the film you watched with your family on Christmas Day in 2022. (For scale: it was watched by 35 million households within three days of its release).

O’Connor is the molten core of Wake Up Dead Man. He co-leads the movie, wielding empathy, sincerity, and comic timing as an earnest boxer-turned-priest caught up in a murder investigation. But even in a killer ensemble that also features Daniel Craig, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, and Glenn Close, O’Connor is the one you’ll be thinking about after the credits roll. Throughout the film, the camera seems to gravitate towards his face like the emotional success of the movie depends upon it—and in the end, it kind of does.

In the spring, he’ll star alongside Emily Blunt in his first genuine blockbuster, a new sci-fi from Steven Spielberg that is so swathed in secrecy that O’Connor can’t even tell me what it’s called, let alone any plot details. It’s the kind of movie—what with Spielberg returning to the genre whose canon he can claim a fair ol’ chunk of—that could follow in the footsteps of Oppenheimer and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners to become that vanishingly rare thing: an auteur movie that does superhero numbers at the box office. With all of this in mind, you start to understand why O’Connor is hiding out in the countryside.

Inside the cottage, O’Connor, 35, grabs some strawberries and cherries out of a Sainsbury’s bag and washes them diligently in the sink. As I watch him, I understand that to a vocal cohort on the internet, I have found Shangri-la. There are people who spend precious hours making TikTok fan edits with captions like “just worked a 12+ hour shift at the loving josh o’connor factory,” and I am living their dream. He is exactly how they want him to be: hospitable, kind, hands-on.

A direct line can be traced back from the Spielberg movie and Knives Out (and a fair share of that thirst) to Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s overtly sexy drama about a messy love triangle between three tennis players, which cultivated a horny young fanbase and pulled in an impressive $96 million at the box office last year. While O’Connor has played many types of men, his most lauded roles—Prince Charles in The Crown, a lonely farmer in the 2017 indie breakout God’s Own Country —have been a little quiet, troubled, sad. But as Patrick Zweig, a washed-up pro clunking his way down the rankings and still trying it on with his mate’s wife Tashi (played by Zendaya), he is arrogant, forthright, bafflingly charismatic. This one just felt different. “He’s just electric; he’s a leading man,” Daniel Craig says of O’Connor’s performance. “All of those things that when you see someone like that, you say, ‘Oh, there you go.’”

Director Rian Johnson watched Challengers before its release because Craig was urging him to cast O’Connor in Wake Up Dead Man. He quickly saw the same elusive quality that Craig is talking about. “There’s no real way to define it,” Johnson says. “I wish I could, but it’s the reason there are great actors and then there are movie stars, and then there are great actors who are also movie stars… I think you can see it with Josh.”

“There was a day where I saw a still of him,” says Oliver Hermanus, who directed O’Connor opposite Paul Mescal in The History of Sound. “I think the behind-the-scenes photographer had taken an image of him in a shot and you just go like, My God, there’s so many angles to him. He can shapeshift… you can kind of imagine him as anything and anyone. And that I think is a movie-star quality, because you lean into him.”

The only person who is still having trouble believing that Josh O’Connor is a movie star is Josh O’Connor. He has that very British trait of being embarrassed by praise and attention, and it is not in his nature to accept this kind of talk about himself, even when it feels like objective truth. “He’s one of the more self-deprecating people you’ll ever meet, endlessly apologetic about his own rangey abilities,” says Blunt.

As we sit at his kitchen table drinking tea, I ask O’Connor whether he is the lead in the Spielberg film. “Ummm…” He pauses, then laughs. He coughs. “I would say it’s an ensemble thing. Definitely not a lead,” he says, taking the piss out of himself. “I wouldn’t say there’s a lead. Probably Emily.” (“I think he’s the lead!” says Blunt when I recount this conversation to her. “It is a big ensemble piece, but Josh is very much the heartbeat.”)

One thing he will admit is that the frenzy around Challengers “felt more hectic” for him personally than the hoopla around The Crown. The fourth season of that show, which really dialed into the Charles and Diana relationship and spotlighted O’Connor and Emma Corrin, was released during lockdown in 2020. Press interviews for it were all done over Zoom, and there weren’t that many opportunities to be overwhelmed by the hugeness of it all. And, really, The Crown had made him famous for playing Prince Charles; he could fade away into the background behind all of that. Challengers, on the other hand, made people far more interested in Josh O’Connor.

He recalls a moment at the film’s London premiere, which came at the tail end of a long stretch of work that had left him feeling burnt out. “I felt so little control over my life in a weird way,” he says. As he emerged from the car onto the red carpet, he saw a wall of photographers screaming at him, which is an intense experience in its own right. But close nearby were his mom and dad and his two brothers. He felt his stomach drop. “There was something about these two worlds of my persona: being in front of these photographers and my career, and then my sweet family who are just the sweetest, like, ‘What are you doing here?’ Do you know what I mean?” He managed to keep his composure in front of the cameras, but went into the cinema bathroom and cried. “I think I just felt incredibly overwhelmed.”

O’Connor is an animated conversationalist. As he’s talking, his hands—large and shovel-like—wave around frequently. When he’s really locked into a point he’s making, he gazes off to the side and down, as if searching for it.

It seems an obvious dilemma, but one you don’t actually hear actors talk about all that much—the push-and-pull between the building blocks that make you a real person and the mechanisms of the job that could consume you whole. But O’Connor is not willing to be engulfed by his work, and being here in the countryside whenever he can, getting his hands in the soil every now and then—that keeps him level. It’s like he said before: “It’s not nice; it’s essential.”

This idea comes up again later, on cup of tea number two, as we’re discussing how he views his career. He brings up Timothée Chalamet’s SAG Awards acceptance speech earlier this year, in which the actor expressed, in a direct manner, his ambitions for “greatness” in acting.

“I found it so refreshing, someone being like, ‘No, I want to be fucking great,’” O’Connor says. “But my first thoughts were like, OK, one, you already are. You did it, mate. But then the other thing was like, Great that you want that, but I hope you want that in your real life too, and I hope it doesn’t only become greatness in acting. I hope it’s greatness in, I don’t know, friendship or in being a great son—which I’m sure he is, I’m sure he’s all those things too, but I hope that that doesn’t become your sole focus.”

It’s not like people weren’t vocally thirsty for Josh O’Connor before Challengers. His admirably empathetic interpretation of Prince Charles stirred strange new feelings even in republicans; as one headline put it: “Oh no, I fancy Prince Charles in The Crown.” But Guadagnino’s film framed him in a new light, as the object of lust—shredded, dripping in sweat, front-footed with his sexuality.

O’Connor is not on social media and wouldn’t read the comments anyway, but they are, in a word, filthy. There’s a TikTok he did for the fashion brand Loewe—a quick-cut compilation of him inhaling (he opens his mouth to say something but the film cuts before he gets a word out) while looking round a modernist villa. A comically long tie swings below his knees. The video has been viewed 11.5 million times. One of the top comments reads: “Shaving my whole body just in case.” It has been liked 30,000 times.

When I bring up all of this thirst while sitting at his kitchen table, O’Connor is reluctant to accept that it has anything to do with him. He says that it’s all about how sexy Challengers is, and that he’s actually pretty underwhelming in real life. He explains that Guadagnino had to coach him to be like Patrick Zweig. “He kept [saying] ‘Confident!’” O’Connor says, emphasizing that this was something that did not come naturally. “He was like, ‘Get your shoulders back. You’re a sexy, confident guy.’”

Guadagnino also gave him some ammo for self-laceration: “He said that my character in Challengers is like a beautiful roast chicken—greasy, delicious, perfectly cooked with some rosemary or whatever—and then he’s like, ‘But if you meet you in reality, you’re like a bit of raw chicken breast.’” O’Connor not only finds this very funny, but he also sees it as a compliment. “I enjoy playing roles that make people think I’m that. That’s transformative, hopefully.”

Maybe a fair share of the horny fans came for Zweig, I say. But they stay for Josh O’Connor—there are evidently many who fell in love while watching him wax lyrical about his love of ceramics in a Vanity Fair YouTube video, or, in that strange Loewe TikTok. They fancy the real you, is what I’m getting at. “I think it is weird to me,” he says. “I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of that, but that’s more just about me and more about the idea of anyone talking about my image, good or bad. That’s kind of uncomfortable.”

You see, even the stuff that is theoretically complimentary in this arena can feel bad. “We’ve all been there where we feel like... I don’t know, maybe we’ve been going to the gym or going running and you just come back from holiday, you’ve got a tan, and you’re like, ‘I think I look great right now,’” he says. “There are those moments in life where you feel good about yourself. If someone says in a comment like, ‘Oh, my God, glow up!’ you’re like, ‘Oh, man,’ because I know that I can only keep that up for a day or two and then I’m back to the burgers. And then, secondly, What was I like [before]? Glow up?!”

O’Connor doesn’t necessarily want to fit into the traditional movie-star aesthetic, anyway. “As a person, Josh has never changed,” says Dior’s creative director Jonathan Anderson. O’Connor had been fronting campaigns for Anderson at his previous brand, Loewe, since 2017. “He has always been the same Josh.”

One of the core movie memories from O’Connor’s childhood was seeing Pete Postlethwaite in Brassed Off, a 1990s comedy about dispirited coal miners in a brass band in the north. “I was like, ‘Whoa,’” he says. “That was the first time I watched a movie where the movie star looks like someone I know, a relative, doesn’t look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club or Leo in Titanic. He looks a bit gnarled and real. I just remember being like, ‘Fuck, that’s incredible.’”

Later, he mentions Postlethwaite again when I ask him about the kind of career he’d like to have. “The movie stars I’m really becoming more and more intrigued by are the ones that do something and then disappear, and then they pop up in this other movie and you’re like, ‘Huh, that’s that guy,’” he tells me. They’re what you might call “journeyman actors,” he says, namechecking Philip Seymour Hoffman, too.

And O’Connor does have plans to go away sometime soon. At least for a bit. He’s wary of talking about it because his mind could change. And the last time he had wanted some time off, he wound up saying yes to Steven Spielberg (who wouldn’t say yes to Steven Spielberg?), which threw everything out of whack. “But it really is time to stop for a second,” he says. “The balance hasn’t been quite right for a little while, and I just want to check in on life a little bit.”

The solitude that might come with the time off shouldn’t be a problem. As a chronically offline person, he’s got plenty of hobbies—pottery, embroidery, and gardening—that sustain him when he’s on his own. “There were endless times where I tried to drag him out to dinner,” Blunt says, “but he’d much rather stay in and watch the footy and then send you the most waffling, apologetic reasons why he couldn’t come.”

One day on the Spielberg set, the cast were waiting in a big green room with a large whiteboard in it before filming a crucial scene. “Where most people would’ve just played hangman on it or something,” Blunt says, “Josh drew the most extraordinary mountainscape, didn’t just sit there on his phone… [That] is the beauty of Josh. It’s like there’s this ‘elsewhere’ in him that’s quite hard to reach.”

“Have you got your swimmers on?” O’Connor shouts as he marches upstairs to grab a towel, and then we head back out to the Volvo. He expresses some anxiety that the place we’re going—a lake in a National Trust park that you are technically not supposed to swim in—will be packed with boozy teens today, but it’s so beautiful that I’ve got to see it. We set off again down some more narrow country roads. Behind the wheel, O’Connor stops frequently to let other drivers go ahead. As they pass with a polite finger-wag, he waves back enthusiastically. “My partner always says that I’m too friendly as a driver,” he says. “To the point where I think people think that I know them, because I’m waving away.”

From where we park, it’s a short walk to the lake, past an old graveyard and down into a valley. O’Connor has been talking it up all afternoon, but it really is as gorgeous as he promised—extremely secluded, surrounded on either side by Scots Pine trees, the lake curving on each side to create a narrow opening hundreds of feet away, which the sun slots into just perfectly on summer evenings. O’Connor likes to come here on his own on winter mornings as the sun is rising, sit by the edge of the water, and breathe.

Today, the teens—red-chested and sipping from cans of cider—are sitting in his meditation spot. We’re about to plant our gear down a couple of feet away from them, but O’Connor changes his mind at the last moment. As we hightail it to a more secluded spot, he tells me that he’d had flashbacks to a time when he was a teenager and some boys had stolen his clothes from the side of the pool. Not again. Not today!

We consider a few muddy entryways to the water on a woodland bank, before O’Connor finally settles on one. He forges ahead, climbing down and standing in waist-high water. “I just want to see how it is on foot,” he says. How is it? I ask him. “Gorgeous, you’ll love it,” he says, lying. I get in and sludgy pond muck seems to encase me from the shin down. But that bit is over quickly, and it soon really is glorious. We swim through some dangling branches out to the main part of the lake. O’Connor is trepidatious about going too far out, so we hover near the shore and trade open-water-based anxieties. Mine: an irrational, intrusive thought that occurs whenever I’m swimming up from below, that I’m going to keep rising and the surface will never come. “Oh, don’t!” he says, disgusted, as he treads water. “Are you kidding?! That’s my worst nightmare. My big fear is getting caught up in weeds.”

A little later, we climb out of the lake safe and sound, listening to the intermittent roars of a football ground in the distance. O’Connor and I trundle up the hill, and a couple of guys walk by us, do a double-take, and then one of them calls out: “Excuse me, Game-Changers was amazing by the way.” O’Connor thanks him graciously, and then turns to me with a slightly puzzled look on his face. “I think he means Challengers,” I whisper.

Josh O’Connor’s first few experiences at the cinema did not go well. First, there was Toy Story in 1995. He was five years old, and he vomited from excitement. A couple of years later, he saw Titanic and it scarred him. “I had severe PTSD-type nightmares,” he says. “It was no fucking joke, I couldn’t sleep.”

The scene that traumatized him: when the ship is sinking, and a mother and father on the lower decks are tucking their kids into bed knowing they’re going to die. “They go, ‘Rather than put you through the trauma of trying to get out and trying to survive and dying, we’re just going to put you to rest,’” he says.

This did not sit right with seven-year-old O’Connor: “I was just like, ‘Would my parents do that? Don’t you fucking dare!’ I’m like, ‘If we’re sinking, we’re trying!’”

But not long after that, the critical cinematic moments of his generation—your Harry Potters and Lord of the Ringses—really locked him in. He now clearly has a good grasp of film history, and yet he remains very self-conscious around movie geeks. “I’ve recently gone into a deep dive of Italian cinema, and so I feel quite good on that at the moment,” he says. “But then someone will say something—they’re like, ‘Oh, you like Italian cinema? What do you think of Pasolini’s blah, blah, blah?’ And you’re like, ‘Fuuuuuck!’”

Stepping onto a Spielberg set triggered dormant memories from O’Connor’s cinematic adolescence. “My first day of filming, there was a lighting rig that was just a big beam of light from car headlights, smoke, rain dripping off pipes,” he says. “And you’re like, ‘This is such a Spielberg setting.’ In some ways you don’t even acknowledge it. But for you and I… Steven Spielberg has been the architect of our childhood. Little things penetrate your mind, whether it’s the headlights [in] Jurassic Park with the rain coming down... or those kids eating all that pudding before their little Tyrannosaurus Rex comes in the window.”

A little over a year ago, when O’Connor was in New York for the Met Gala, Spielberg had asked to meet him: “He just said to me, ‘I’ve got this idea for this movie I’ve wanted to make for a long time.’ And he sort of described it, but not enough. He didn’t tell me the story of the movie. He just said, ‘It’s kind of like this, and there’s like these two characters.’ And I was like, ‘Right.’ And he was like, ‘It is kind of this, but it’s not.’ And I was like, ‘Right.’ And he was like, ‘Sound good?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, but not because of that, because it’s you! You haven’t told me anything.’”

Spielberg, O’Connor tells me, is still a refreshingly collaborative director. “He’s not in any way complacent,” he says. “He’s still calling you the night before, being like, ‘What do you think of this line?’”

One night, O’Connor was having trouble cracking a particular emotional scene, which they’d be shooting the following day. He texted Spielberg to pick his brain. “Sometimes he will say something that’s mind-blowing and poetic and incredible,” O’Connor says. They texted back and forth, and O’Connor felt somewhat resolved. But then, a little while later, another text came through. It read: “The door is ajar, just push.”

This made perfect sense to O’Connor. “Because it was about emotion,” he says. “And I was like, ‘The door is ajar, just push’? You know when you’re choking up and emotional and you’re holding it in, holding it in, and then something just makes you go pffft,” he gestures as if dissolving into a pool of his own tears. That little phrase had totally unlocked the scene. He already knew he was working with a genius, but this cemented it.

The next day, when he saw Spielberg on set, he just said: “The door is ajar, just push.”

“And he was like, ‘What?’”

As it turned out, the text was intended for Spielberg’s wife, who was coming in late that night and had forgotten her key. O’Connor was mortified. “But I was right to investigate it, because it is the kind of thing he would write,” he says. “And it fucking worked!”

When I spoke to Daniel Craig and Rian Johnson, they both independently brought up another film that alerted them to Josh O’Connor’s brilliance: Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, a meandering, knowingly not-for-everyone Italian drama that filmed in two chunks in 2022, bookending the Challengers shoot. In it, O’Connor plays Arthur, a haunted archaeologist/tomb raider in a mucky beige suit who is searching for his ex-girlfriend in 1980s Tuscany. It’s a strange and beautiful film, that feels like a lost VHS tape rather than a contemporary indie.

“La Chimera, is, you could argue, the completely opposite side of the spectrum in terms of performance,” Johnson said. “It’s a very reserved performance. And it’s not like Challengers, [where] he’s just spreading his legs open on screen and eating churros with abandon. He’s very electric in that way, but you feel the same magnetism when he’s playing a character who’s grieving for a loss in his life. In La Chimera, there’s still something that grabs you and draws you in.”

As we’re walking back to the car after our swim, O’Connor tells me that La Chimera is probably the thing he’s most proud of in his career. Here’s why: just shy of a year before he filmed it, his grandmother had passed away. “She was very much my best friend,” he says. “I think I was probably for the first time in my life experiencing a level of grief.” She was a respected ceramicist who had taught him about her art form, so he could understand his character’s obsession with Etruscan ceramics. But he connected with the film on a much deeper level than that. “I think that the timing of La Chimera was strangely a comfort to me, and what’s explored in that movie, of Arthur trying to kind of contact the afterlife or contact this other world, the unseen—that felt like something I wanted.”

Looking back, he recognizes now that when his grandmother died, he was caught up in a tornado of work and didn’t have the time to truly come to terms with the loss. “La Chimera was almost like a process of grief in a weird way,” he says. And O’Connor is self-aware enough to know that while this was a beautiful example of catharsis through film, it was also evidence that his work-life balance needed attention. Figuring this out wasn’t necessarily an everything-pulls-into-focus moment, but another step in a long journey towards understanding himself. Shortly after La Chimera wrapped, he bought his countryside cottage.

Today, three years later, he doesn’t feel like he’s made as much progress as he’d like. “While I do feel like family is very important and cultivating my own life outside of work is important to me, I actually would say that the reality is I haven’t been cultivating it,” he says. He still feels untethered by having to spend months at a time away from the people he cares most about, with time differences that make communication a real slog.

“Things like that, they start to chip away at you a bit,” he says. “Me and my partner, we celebrate the days where we’re in the same place for a whole day. And maybe we both have bits of work to do in London, we’ll have a cup of coffee in the morning together. She’ll go off, I’ll go off, we’ll come back in the evening and I’ll be able to cook for her. And I’m like, ‘This is a holiday.’” He knows that for most people, his work sounds like a holiday. And sometimes it feels that way. But it is work.

Paul Mescal, his History of Sound co-star, talked about O’Connor’s work ethic, and the mark it can leave behind. “His attention to detail in the way that he prepares for work to me is just second to none. I’ve seen first-hand the toll that this care for his work can have on his life. He puts so much into it,” Mescal says. “So it’s no surprise to me whatsoever that Josh is having a moment of desire in his life to reconnect to the world outside work. But I’m so grateful as a friend and as a fan of his work that he puts as much of his heart into everything as he does.”

So, O’Connor will probably go away for a bit. It’s not like there’s some big bucket list item he’s endlessly pursuing. He knows his grandmother would be proud of him for everything he’s achieved. Now, he thinks, it’s probably time to get back to living real life. “The truth is I’ve already had my dream career, like, beyond my dreams,” he says. “So I’ve done it, as far as I’m concerned. Originally, I just wanted to make theatre. And then I fell in love with film and I’ve been able to work with my favorite filmmakers. But I guess I’ve just got to the stage where I’m like, OK, what can I do that’s going to feed me as a person in my normal life?”

After we leave the park, he drives me to his favorite local pub. We don’t actually have time for a pint, but he just wants me to see it. He points through his car window, to the pub’s window, through which you can just about see the window on the other side, which has what he assures me is a stunning view of the valley. This is one of O’Connor’s gifts: he can appreciate beauty where others might not. And he’s deeply enthusiastic about the world around him, even if one thing or another keeps him from interacting with it as fully as he’d like. But what if he could just walk into the pub and gaze out of the window instead of peering in?

When we get back to the railway station, O’Connor waits on the platform with me as the delay on my train stretches into double figures. We stand there and chat about the future – in real life, not our careers. Then we hug goodbye, and he drives off to take care of his garden.

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Styling by Tobias Frericks
Grooming by Petra Sellge
Produced by Bellhouse
Local production by Stuart McClay

This story originally appeared in British GQ.