This article was first published on April 7 2024
The waitress arrives and Jack O’Connell claps his hands together. “What’ll it be, what’ll it be? You’ve got sparkling water? Ah, that’s great for me. Bless ya. They’re good here aren’t they, Scarlett?”
I’d been warned about O’Connell by someone else who had interviewed him and described him as “so charming you’ll forget to ask him any questions”. Well, I’m certainly getting the full charm today. He stares earnestly when I ask him something, then asks me lots of questions back in his thick Derby accent; he laughs easily and is completely and utterly devoid of any pretence. “I went to the Met Gala once, I didn’t know what it was,” the 33-year-old actor tells me. “I was just wearing a whistle and flute, think it was by Burberry, then I saw Sarah Jessica Parker wearing a tree. I was like, where am I? It was fun, though.”
We’re on a sofa in a central London hotel — “Nice spot here, Scarlett, good one” — and the topic of conversation is Back to Black, a new film about Amy Winehouse’s rise to fame and how she became one of the most celebrated artists in recent history. Industry’s Marisa Abela plays the singer, after undergoing months of coaching to sing like her, while O’Connell is Blake Fielder-Civil, Winehouse’s husband from 2007 to 2009. Their first break-up inspired her seminal 2006 album, Back to Black. The marriage ended two years before her death from alcohol poisoning in 2011, when she was 27.
“I spent an afternoon with him,” O’Connell says of Fielder-Civil, who is now 41. “He was quite open. He spoke so highly of Amy. There was something so genuine in how he spoke, it was unquestionable to me that he loved her. That informed how I wanted to portray him. The weird thing was, I left him, turned my car around and Valerie [the Zutons track covered by Winehouse] was f***ing playing on the radio.”
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I’m surprised he met you, I say, as surely he knows the film may stir up some public hatred? He was the one everyone blamed for her drug addiction and eventual downfall, and he has admitted to introducing her to heroin. “He wasn’t overly keen, ’cos obviously it’s going into a phase of his life that is very personal and he harbours a mixed bag of emotions,” O’Connell says. “But a part of my analysis is that we’re talking about [being in your] mid-twenties. God knows what we were getting up to in our mid-twenties. You wouldn’t want to be doing that under a microscope and still be held accountable for it today. And to understand that relationship, the fame that was a by-product of her success, all the negativity that came with that … We’re all fallible. And drugs were f***ing rife then. Heavy drugs were so heavily done and glamorised.”
Since pictures of filming were released last year, the project has come under fire for being “ridiculous” and “tasteless” and for coming too soon after Winehouse’s death. O’Connell thinks about this. “What is the acceptable timescale of that? Put it like this: if we were trying to portray her in any form of negative light, then that might be a valid point and I can understand one or two people pre-empting that. But if you talk to Sam [Taylor-Johnson, the director] we’re not even calling this a biopic, it’s a celebration. I can get with that.” Winehouse’s father, Mitch, visited the set occasionally. “I think he wanted to deck me when he saw me dressed as Blake.”
O’Connell grew up in Derby. A series of injuries prevented him from becoming a footballer, which was his first dream, then he hoped to enlist in the army but was prevented because of a juvenile criminal record. He left school with two GCSEs, but while there he had enjoyed drama classes and also studied drama at the free Television Workshop in Nottingham. He began auditioning in London, getting discounted train fares because his father worked on the railway and sleeping on park benches when he couldn’t afford a hotel.
His first film part was impressive enough — as Pukey in the 2006 Shane Meadows film This Is England — but the role that changed everything was as the bad-boy teenager James Cook in the E4 show Skins, the drama about sex and drug-fuelled teenagers in Bristol. It had launched the careers of Nicholas Hoult and Dev Patel when O’Connell joined the cast as its lead in the third series, playing Cook from 2009 to 2013. O’Connell likens that period of his life to being at university. “We were that age in Bristol, a big student city with great nightlife,” he says. With success came fame, parties, festivals and free clothes. “Life back then was mental. Such a different world from what I knew in Derby. You got invited to everything and got to bring your mates along, it was mad.”
In 2014 Angelina Jolie picked him to star as Louis Zamperini in Unbroken, her drama about the Olympian who was caught by the Japanese navy during the Second World War and sent to a PoW camp. He won a rising star Bafta for the part. In 2016 he starred alongside George Clooney and Julia Roberts in the Jodie Foster-directed drama Money Monster; the following year he played the lead in the Netflix series Godless, then shared a stage in London with Sienna Miller in a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. More recently he was in the 2022 Steven Knight-created BBC drama SAS Rogue Heroes (the second series is coming later this year), plus he has starred in campaigns for Prada and is the face of Cos. He thinks he might have been more successful in Hollywood if he had a posher accent. “The Derby twang is not marketable,” he says. “I think Americans think I’m a hillbilly, that I support Trump, which I wouldn’t. But there we go, there’s f*** all I can do about it, Scarlett.”
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O’Connell is still close with his mates from Derby and goes back often to visit them, his mother and his grandmother (his father died from cancer in 2009). Back in the party days he dated his Skins co-star Kaya Scodelario, the N-Dubz singer Tulisa and, allegedly, Cara Delevingne. But life is more wholesome now: when he’s not working he likes to cook, visit galleries and hang out with his girlfriend Imogen (“a superstar”) — a hair stylist from Derby whom he has known since his school days. They live together in north London. “I’m a class boyfriend,” he says. “But if I have a shave I don’t always rinse the sink. That’s minging, isn’t it? There’s no excuse. But we’re in a healthy relationship. I’m content and grateful for my work and life right now.”
• Read our interview with Marisa Abela: ‘I hope Amy would feel proud’
He closed his Instagram account years ago on the advice of Clooney. “It’s bliss to be unplugged from all that.” Fame, he says, “doesn’t enter the household”. It’s something he says he’s still learning to navigate. “It takes you a long time. Every day you’re still learning. Whether it’s about your craft or about how to conduct yourself. Going back to the film, that’s why I feel a huge amount of sympathy and empathy for what Amy was going through — that level of attention. Thank God I don’t have that.”
As we order the bill, which he offers to pay for, I wonder if he has read any of the public’s comments about Back to Black, or specifically about him as Fielder-Civil. “I avoid it and shut it off. If you go looking for it, you’ll find everything you want to read and everything you don’t want to read. I think as soon as you tap into that you’re asking for trouble. It’s tempting, of course, because you’ve always got it [your phone] in your pocket. But it’s self-flagellation in the end.”
Then, with a drag of his vape and a grin, he adds: “That might be the wisest thing I’ve ever said.”
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Back to Black is in cinemas nationwide from Friday
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