‘God’s Own Country’: the film that put Josh O’Connor on the map
Starring opposite Zendaya in a headline-grabbing sports drama has introduced a new generation of viewers to the talents of Josh O’Connor, even though he wasn’t exactly a struggling unknown before being cast in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers.
In fact, almost the exact opposite is true. The actor was already the recipient of a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor – Television Series Drama’ and a Primetime Emmy for ‘Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series’ for playing Prince Charles in the third and fourth seasons of Netflix’s The Crown.
Not to generalise, but there isn’t exactly a massive amount of overlap between Zendaya’s most obsessive subset of superfans and the target demographic of the streaming service’s historical account of the royal family. That’s why, for many people, Challengers marked their first introduction to O’Connor as a performer.
However, he’s been working solidly for well over a decade at this point in both film and television. He’s been the first-billed name in the London-set spiritual remake The Magnificent Eleven and intimate romance Hide and Seek, a supporting player in Doctor Who and Peaky Blinders. In addition, he was also noticed for his contributions to the dramatic thriller The Riot Club, biopic Florence Foster Jenkins, and acclaimed period piece La Chimera, but it was 2017’s God’s Own Country that first put him on the map as a star firmly on the rise.
Winning the prize of ‘Best Male Actor’ at the British Independent Film Awards, O’Connor plays increasingly disillusioned sheep farmer Johnny Saxby, who struggles with running the family business after his father suffers a stroke. To keep himself occupied away from the fields, Johnny falls into heavy drinking and casual sex until a migrant worker upends his entire worldview.
When Alec Secăreanu’s Gheorghe is brought in to lend a helping hand during lambing season, the initial tensions and professional respect between the two blossom into something different. A passionate and complicated affair emerges that pits their increasing dependency on each other against the bleak, unforgiving, isolating, and often unaccepting world of generational farming.
Written and directed by Francis Lee, the filmmaker’s debut feature is a raw and touching portrayal of a love story set against a backdrop that’s hardly part and parcel of cinematic romance. On paper, the ‘outsider teaches a self-destructive loner what it means to love’ narrative has been done to death and then some on-screen, but God’s Own Country uses that familiarity to its benefit to paint the familiar tropes with fresh strokes.
An intense, evocative, and often heart-wrenching rumination on the loneliness that often comes with responsibility, the personal and societal pressures of living up to a family name, the far-reaching struggles of how toxic masculinity impacts not only an individual but those around them, and the often dangerous pitfalls that need to be navigated while falling in love, O’Connor’s powerhouse performance conveys it all. It places the burden of such multifaceted character-building squarely on his shoulders, which he proceeds to knock clean out of the park in a star-making turn that signalled there were very big things to come.
