Despite having won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his performance as the young Prince Charles in two seasons of The Crown, Josh O’Connor was a little surprised to be asked to comment on the coronation last May. “I’m the least qualified person,” he whispers when we meet for coffee near his home in northwest London a month later.
Aside from observing the way the future king walked and spoke, O’Connor arrived at The Crown’s nuanced portrait by considering Charles to be a fictional character, outlined in the script as a burdened man: resented by his father, trapped in a “grotesque misalliance” with a woman he doesn’t love, endlessly waiting for his life to take on the meaning for which it is destined. Still, the 33-year-old actor tends to be protective of the characters he’s played, and he couldn’t help feeling relief when the real Charles ascended to the throne. “I watched the highlights,” he says, “and I was glad he got to put on his expensive hat.”
O’Connor’s own hat today is a faded red baseball cap, under which his face creases readily into cheerfulness. He is six feet two—taller than you might imagine from some renditions of him onscreen—and his lean, supple frame somehow reinforces the sense of his gentleness. He is known to his friends for leaving funny, wrought, self-deprecating voice notes, and these can be imagined, pretty much, within minutes of meeting him.
Though he’s familiar to many viewers thanks to his stint as Prince Charles, and while others may have seen him in Emma or Mothering Sunday, or in the National Theatre’s filmed Romeo & Juliet with Jessie Buckley, it was as the complex and inward-looking Yorkshire farmhand in Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country that O’Connor came to the attention of some of his current collaborators. Jonathan Anderson, creative director at Loewe and now a good friend, was drawn to the humility O’Connor radiated onscreen, and instantly sought him out as the face of the Loewe men’s line. (“In a weird way, he’s the best example of the guy next door,” Anderson says.) Luca Guadagnino, who cast him opposite Zendaya and Mike Faist in Challengers, the forthcoming tennis-themed love triangle, also wanted to work with him straightaway. Guadagnino found him to be not only “loyal, quirky, and ironic” but “a fierce actor with a striking range of emotions.” Fierce and humble: It’s this span of possible readings that has brought O’Connor to a critical juncture in his creative life.
In order to play Patrick Zweig, the dashing, temperamental, opportunistic tennis player in Challengers, O’Connor read Andre Agassi’s best-selling autobiography, Open, and became “obsessed” with the volatile Australian player Nick Kyrgios. “It’s definitely mostly psychological,” he says of the sport. “Mind games play a huge part.” When he saw Kyrgios doing “really crude things with his water bottle” during a break, he thought, This is like Patrick! and aimed to incorporate it. He trained every day for four weeks with Agassi’s former coach Brad Gilbert, and went with Gilbert to see Rafael Nadal play at Wimbledon. Though he fell in love with tennis by the end, as a player he professes to be “still pretty rubbish.” (The actors had tennis doubles for the film.) O’Connor’s focus was more on everything tennis allows Guadagnino to show of the human psyche: “lust and desire and hatred and jealousy”—all of which emerge from the film in brilliantly agonizing quantities.
Guadagnino knew that he was casting against type. Truth be told, O’Connor struggles with the very idea of competition. Here’s how he has spent the past few months: After making the film, he traveled around Europe on his own in a reconditioned DHL delivery truck transformed into a camper van and painted sunflower yellow. He spent the whole of last January doing a ceramics course in Cornwall, and yearns to spend a significant portion of his life making “functional plates and bowls.” Having lived in New York for a spell with his former partner, he’s now about to buy a house in a village outside Stroud in Gloucestershire—contemporary Britain’s answer to the flower-child era. Stroud is the birthplace of the Extinction Rebellion movement and has what O’Connor describes as “Woodstock vibes.” It’s also near where he grew up. Many of his childhood friends still live in that area, as do his parents. As the middle son of a midwife and an English teacher—and as the grandson of a sculptor and a ceramicist—O’Connor speaks of “inherited hippieness” the way others might refer to inherited wealth. He’s looking forward to growing vegetables and planting cherry trees in his new garden, and to having a pottery studio, eventually. “Will you have bees?” I ask, harking back to The Wonders, a film by Alice Rohrwacher that he admires. “I’m definitely going to have that,” he replies, before adding: “I’m going to have everything!” An expansive grin stretches across his face, suggesting not greed or ambition but an almost boyish commitment to this all-encompassing life.
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There is a quality in O’Connor as an actor that’s more than openness. It’s an almost mystic implication of a world within the person he embodies. Even when he’s playing someone who’s dissociated, repressed, or sly (Johnny the farm boy, the future King Charles, Patrick the down-and-out tennis star), there is a sense of something lurking: a further layer the viewer might relate to. Sometimes this layer contains fragility, sometimes it’s wrapped in mischief, but whatever it is, in any given character it suggests a story before the story of the script itself has even begun.
Rohrwacher, who directed him in the forthcoming La Chimera, sensed something in him that surprised her. O’Connor had seen her previous feature, Happy as Lazzaro, and, “spellbound,” found a way to get a fan letter to her. When they spoke via Skype, Rohrwacher was preparing a film about a man who was heading toward, in her expression, “the sunset of his life”—a character worn by experience. So she was looking for a much older actor. After the call, Rohrwacher says, she closed her eyes and began to reimagine the whole film around O’Connor. “He suggested something to me about the character that was not his age but something deeper, more interior. Immediately I started to think, Wow, it would be so beautiful to work with him.”
Arthur, the Englishman played by O’Connor, lives in a shack on the side of a hill in Italy, and wears, throughout the film, an ’80s white linen suit, which gives him, as O’Connor puts it, “something of an angelic nature.” A band of Italian grave robbers depends on his gift for dowsing, or “feeling the void,” in order to dig for ancient objects buried in Etruscan tombs. Arthur himself, though, is stricken with grief for his dead girlfriend, and is looking for something beyond material treasure.
“My opinion is that it’s not spiritual at all,” O’Connor reflects. His approach was more practical. “We all have the capacity to see the unseen and to experience the past in a different way. This film fell just a year after my grandmother passed away, and I remember there were a couple of occasions when I really felt her presence. Maybe because I was studying for this film, that world opened up to me.”
Rohrwacher was nervous when they were due to shoot the part where Arthur tests the countryside with divining rods—the practice is called rhabdomancy—but when the moment came, she felt O’Connor was really doing it. “So simple but so true,” she says. “The most wonderful thing is not about his acting,” she adds. “It’s that he’s an incredible person. We do this work not just to make a movie. I think we do it to understand something about human beings. You immediately see if an actor is just thinking about the movie, or if they’re really thinking about this work as a way to look for something else as well. I think Josh has this capacity.”
At St. Edward’s school in Cheltenham, O’Connor was not, in a friend’s estimation, “the coolest kid in the year, but he got on with everybody.” His father taught there, and though O’Connor never found himself in his classroom, his father’s knowledge of Shakespeare guided him behind the scenes. (There was also one memorable occasion when Mr. O’Connor had to stand in for the sex education teacher.) Mike Gilbert, who has known O’Connor since the pair were 11, tells a story about the day the school prefects were announced. Being head boy or indeed having any other position of responsibility in the English schooling system was unlikely to be in the cards for O’Connor, whose career in stunts and gags and general detention-earning charm had been somewhat stellar. And so it came to pass: no special role for Josh. So he invented one. “He requested very politely to be made lost property prefect,” Gilbert remembers. This was not a role that existed, since “lost property” was a cupboard, accessible to anyone. In it, however, O’Connor saw the perfect basis for a long-running joke: He would become a comic middle manager based on Ricky Gervais in The Office. Posters proliferated, with time slots when students could see O’Connor and retrieve their belongings; announcements and motivational speeches were made about lost property from the school stage. None of the teachers could stop him because he was, after all, providing a service. “He carved out his own way,” says Gilbert, before adding happily: “Our relationship is built on being pretty stupid.”
O’Connor could have been an artist—friends still comment on his drawing skills—but by the age of 16 it was clear that acting was for him. A drama teacher took him under his wing and introduced him to “Bertolt Brecht and Stanislavski, and everything in between,” O’Connor says. No one from St. Edward’s had ever applied to drama school, but this teacher—Mr. Strachan—showed him what was possible, and before long O’Connor was following his heroes Daniel Day-Lewis and Pete Postlethwaite to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, set up in 1946 by Laurence Olivier. O’Connor lists a number of other actors in his cohort: “I stole from them all the time. They’d do stuff that would blow my mind, and I’d think, I want to be more like them. It was an incredible time.”
At the start of his career, one thing that used to get him down was his dyslexia. “You’d be sent maybe 10 pages of dialogue to learn 48 hours before doing it in front of a director and casting director,” he remembers. “And that was just a nightmare. I had friends at drama school who could honestly look at a script and do it. And I was always so jealous.” Then someone told him to see it as an advantage. “And now I firmly believe that.” By reading a script four times when others may only need to read it once, he explains, “you are seeing things that other people aren’t seeing. Maybe not consciously, but things are happening, decisions are starting to be made without you knowing. I think I wouldn’t be half the actor or artist or anything else if I wasn’t dyslexic.”
A few days after our cup of coffee we meet again at the National Theatre. O’Connor is wearing a pair of black cotton Loewe trousers with some battered white Acne Studios sneakers (he likes shoes to last him a minimum of five years), mismatched socks, and a T-shirt bearing a flower alongside the slogan “Anti-growth Coalition.” He greets me with a hug and, barely pausing, embarks on a long-strided tour of his favorite spaces. “This is the most important building in London!” he announces, with a categorical enthusiasm I have quickly come to recognize. O’Connor grew up a Catholic. But, he says, sweeping his arms toward Denys Lasdun’s imprinted concrete walls, “I sort of think this is my God now.”
In 2020 he was due to play Romeo on the Olivier stage at the National opposite Jessie Buckley’s Juliet, but the theater had to be closed to the public. They shot it as a film instead. The theater was empty, and whenever he had a break he would wrap up against the cold and lie on a bench on the terrace here, looking up at the clear night sky.
Buckley and O’Connor met 10 years ago, when O’Connor, recently graduated from drama school, was in a play at the Southwark Playhouse in London. Buckley came to see it because a friend of hers was in it too. She and O’Connor have been fast friends ever since—which explains, to some extent, the extraordinary naturalism and immediacy of their performances in that film. “We really had each other’s backs to take whatever risks we wanted,” Buckley tells me. “Also everyone just loves being around and working with Josh. I think he brings out the unseen magic in everyone he comes into contact with.”
O’Connor and I walk along the Thames, past the skateboarders on the Southbank, as he tells me about his clothes. “A lot of my stuff comes from skateboarding shops,” he says, coincidentally. “Skateboarding brands make the best jeans. And they’ve always got really nice designs. Actually there’ve been a few times where I’ve been walking along in my normal clothes and skateboarders have gone past and been like, ‘Yes, mate!’ ” O’Connor shrinks a bit and says, under his breath: “I’m like, I’m not in your gang! I know I look like I am but I’m not….”
He still dreams of performing at the National Theatre, but he has no plays lined up for now. His film career is keeping him busy: There are the Rohrwacher and Guadagnino films, plus a small part in Lee, in which he plays the son of Kate Winslet’s Lee Miller, and there’s a secret project, he says, in Colorado that he’ll begin shooting soon.
On his Spotify that day are the 1920s German composer Kurt Weill, the ’60s American sax player King Curtis, as well as Blood Orange, Yumi Zouma, and Lizzo. He loves choral music. There was a period when he tried to find somewhere to listen to the Rachmaninoff Vespers every Christmas—“one of the greatest bits of composition you will ever hear.” His wide-ranging cultural tastes are confirmed by Gilbert, who is quick to explain that although you might associate O’Connor with art house films and ceramics, he loves Superbad too, and watches Love Actually “at least half a dozen times a year.” He’s also happier in his own company than his gregariousness might suggest. Given the choice, says Gilbert, he’d pick pizza and FIFA over a celebrity-filled party any day.
So far, so well-adjusted. Yet O’Connor has become something of a public advocate for psychotherapy. Why is that, I wonder? “It makes you a more rounded person,” O’Connor says simply, before looking a little sheepish. “This is a very terrible admission,” he says, “but in some ways, I think the reason I first went to a therapist is because I thought it looked cool to have a therapist. Now I stay because it’s amazing! I always had this notion that people go to therapists because they’ve got problems. I wish I’d known that you can be okay and go to therapy and still benefit so much.”
Half the time, he says, he’s trying to get to the bottom of why he feels happy. “Right now, it’s the happiest I’ve been for a long time. I’m really kind of in a peaceful, relaxed space. But I also want to work and I want to be creative. And that’s, you know, a difficult balance.”
In this story: grooming, Liz Taw. Produced by The Curated Co.; With Thanks to F Cooke Pie & Mash Hoxton.
The interviews and photography in this story predated the SAG-AFTRA strike.