Josh O’Connor — a cowboy! Yes, the 35-year-old former Prince Charles from The Crown, the boxer-priest from Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man, the Yorkshire sheep farmer from God’s Own Country, the swaggering Yank tennis ace from Challengers and the grief-stricken English archaeologist from La Chimera? He is now unerringly real in the western melodrama Rebuilding, playing a taciturn Colorado cowboy, with boots, jeans, ten-gallon hat and thousand-yard stare.
This chameleonic immersion for the Cheltenham-raised, Cotswolds-based, soft-spoken powerhouse is not a new thing. It was there from the start. In 2017 O’Connor’s God’s Own Country director, Francis Lee, called his lead actor a “shapeshifter”, noting how he had dropped 22lb and worked on a farm for months to “become” the protagonist of that film. Since then O’Connor has done outlandish things to incarnate as his characters, including training every day for a month with Brad Gilbert, the coach of Coco Gauff, for the closing tennis scene in Challengers, and moving to Italy and living in a camper van to convince as the dishevelled lead of La Chimera.
Some enamoured observers are calling him the new Daniel Day-Lewis, and it seems that everybody now wants a piece. He talks of taking a break from work, but was so busy last year that he stacked up four releases in quick succession, including Wake Up Dead Man, which pushed Vogue magazine to declare: “This is the autumn of Josh O’Connor”.
Coming up he has Steven Spielberg’s alien invasion blockbuster Disclosure Day, in which he plays the lead role, plus a film from Joel Coen called Jack of Spades. We speak while he speeds across London from the rehearsals of his next film, Three Incestuous Sisters, co-starring the Oscar winner Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson and Saoirse Ronan.
“I don’t see it as disappearing into a role,” he says on being chameleonic, after discussing the preparation he did for Rebuilding, which included working on a Colorado ranch (of course) and refining his horsemanship skills. “I actually don’t think there’s ever such a thing as losing yourself in the role, personally.”
He explains a complicated ratio process that he calls “the potion”, in which his roles are split between the character and his own psyche (“Arthur in La Chimera was 60 per cent Josh and 40 per cent Arthur”) before admitting: “Of course, it’s a lovely thing to be able to make a film and go, ‘I don’t recognise myself’ or ‘I don’t recognise elements of me’. That is lovely and I want that. But I wonder if, as I’m getting older, that ratio is tipping ever so slightly to more of Josh than of the character.”
He adds that Dusty, his cowboy protagonist in Rebuilding, is also “60 per cent Josh and 40 per cent Dusty”. It is a gripping portrait of male loneliness in the face of impossible practical hardships. Dusty’s family ranch is obliterated by wildfires before the opening credits roll (we hear it on the soundtrack only), and the drama that follows examines Dusty’s transition from an independent, philosophical loner to someone who has to acknowledge the hopelessness of his situation and submit himself to the kindness of strangers.
It’s a delicate film, moving in places, and Dusty is faultlessly played by O’Connor, who was “unrelentingly nice” to cast and crew, yet utterly commanding in his craft, says the film’s director, Max Walker-Silverman. “It was completely unnerving to watch him go through a take in his rancher dialogue and I go ‘Cut!’ and he’s immediately right back to sounding like someone you’ve just run into in the Cotswolds,” Walker-Silverman says.
O’Connor says he was drawn to the film because it’s about the power of community, how true adversity can only be healed by the company of others, and how in his own life he’s always trying to find and nurture community among his peers, before and beyond the camera. Oddly, I can vouch for that. We are neighbours in the Cotswolds, we frequent the same pub and swim in the same “secret” lake, and the last time we crossed paths by the water he was there among a giddy posse of actors that included the Hamnet stars Buckley and Paul Mescal. Others in O’Connor’s close community include Vanessa Kirby (aka Princess Margaret from The Crown) and the actors-turned-directors Harris Dickinson (Urchin) and Emerald Fennell (Saltburn).
I list the names and suggest that he seems to be part of a new and committed generation of go-getting creatives. They are an invigorating Anglo-Irish squad — already dubbed “the Craic Pack” — conspicuously different from the previous generation (Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch) and possibly the best thing to happen to acting in Britain since the generation of Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Richard Burton and Albert Finney.
“I don’t think I see it as ‘this is our generation’,” he says. “I don’t see it as anything other than all of those guys that you’ve listed are my friends, and I think we’re all really fortunate. Right now we are all just really lucky because we’re getting to work.”
It’s true he needs a break. “I suffer from being away from home so much. Just think about what we’ve been discussing — community. We live in the same place. I moved there a few years ago, but until very recently I haven’t been able to build a community there. My job takes me to these extraordinary places and I make incredible bonds with a small travelling circus for a number of months. But then you go your separate ways. These transactional relationships can take their toll. So my feeling of wanting to take a break is real. It’s just easier said than done.”
Why? “It comes from a place of thinking that our current job will be our last. All actors think that. I remember Judi Dench saying that every time she finished a job she thought, ‘That’s it! I’ll be found out and never work again!’ We’re all terrified of that, and that’s what keeps us working.”
O’Connor was brought up the middle brother of three by his mother, a midwife, and his father, a teacher. He was drawn to the arts at a young age and introduced to the power of pottery by his grandmother, the ceramicist Romola Jane Farquharson. Then he discovered drama in primary school and, today, with tongue only slightly in cheek (there is chuckling), he remembers the transformative reality of being cast as the Scarecrow in a school production of The Wizard of Oz, just weeks after being diagnosed with dyslexia.
“It was the first time that I’d ever stood on stage, and I often think about it,” he says. “We were at a state Catholic school in Cheltenham, and they didn’t have the funds to get the rights for The Wizard of Oz music, and so all the songs were originals written by our teacher. And my song, as the Scarecrow, and having just discovered that I was dyslexic, contained the lyrics, ‘I just can’t think, I can’t make that link!’” He clarifies that the song was not written especially for his dyslexia, but adds that the experience was profoundly affecting and significant.
Drama studies followed, at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (most famous alumnus: Day-Lewis), as did five postgraduate years in the wilderness, “working my socks off in cafés, bars and call centres to make a living, and when I got an acting job it was a holiday from that”. Professional gigs at that time, mostly TV, included bit parts in Peaky Blinders and Ripper Street and a recurring role in The Durrells.
After dazzling in God’s Own Country as a sexually repressed and semi-alcoholic gay farmer, O’Connor was chosen to play Prince Charles in The Crown. He has frequently joked that he was cast mainly because of his prominent ears and claims that when his buddy Kirby told him that the producers were on the hunt for the ideal Charles, he held his hands up to his ears and said: “I wonder if they’ll be coming for these?”
Once he was cast, his gift to The Crown was to reveal the sympathetic soul of a character that could easily have been a villainous foil to Emma Corrin’s ethereal Princess Diana. He has said that the key to his version of Charles was capturing the burden of being an heir, and that he imagined the future monarch as a soldier yearning to go to war. That, he has said, gave the character “juice”.
The Crown effectively turbo-charged O’Connor’s career, propelling him into that rarefied place where leading men and A-listers collide. His Wake Up Dead Man director, Rian Johnson, recently said: “There are great actors and there are movie stars, and there are great actors who are also movie stars… I think you can see it with Josh.”
He’s a gardening enthusiast, and confesses that deadheading his roses is a favourite activity. The only aspect of his life that’s more closely guarded than the location of “our” secret lake is the identity of his romantic partner. He appears to have been dating the Wuthering Heights actress Alison Oliver since 2024, and they have been featured in multiple paparazzi pics of strolls and smooches. Yet both refuse to comment, and Oliver recently outlined their stance to The Times, saying: “Your personal life is your personal life. I’m just choosing not to talk about that.”
Up next is the summer blockbuster Disclosure Day. And yes, he says, working with Spielberg was everything he imagined and more. “The surprising thing I learnt is just how much of the language of my imagination was designed by Spielberg,” he says. “Being on a Spielberg set, you suddenly recognise certain things. On my first day of filming it was raining and we were in a basement, and there was a light beam on my face with fog going through it and I went, ‘Wow, I’m in a Spielberg movie!’ These visual cues are very recognisable.”
He then catches himself and carefully adds: “But the most important thing is that he is the most kind and thoughtful, caring soul.”
At which point a Los Angeles publicist crackles into the call to announce that time is up and that Josh O’Connor, shapeshifting powerhouse and A-lister in the making, is urgently needed elsewhere. Of course he is.
Rebuilding is in cinemas from Apr 17; Disclosure Day is released on Jun 12
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