The “one in a million” musician Jack O’Connell never got the chance to play: “He’s a working-class hero”
Probably the most in-demand young actor (if 35 still counts as young) around right now, alongside Austin Butler, Timothée Chalamet and that kid from Adolescence, Jack O’Connell is coming off the back of the outrageously good vampire hit Sinners, and has plenty more on the way.
O’Connell’s upbringing was anything but straightforward; he was in and out of court for misdemeanours as a teen and struggled with substance abuse, losing his father and having a promising football career cut short due to injury. It was only thanks to school drama classes and sometimes sleeping rough in London to attend auditions that his acting career took hold.
The first of his latest films is 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which hits cinemas later this month, and the Alex Garland-penned spin-off promises to build effectively on Danny Boyle’s third instalment in the franchise last year, which got excellent reviews. O’Connell was typically menacing in that movie too as the psychopathic leader of the murderous ‘Jimmys’ gang, but then he already has a two-decade career behind him, excelling in black-hearted roles.
The first time he showed just how terrifying he could be was as a ‘youth’ in the fearsomely bleak Eden Lake, the low-budget shocker that co-starred Michael Fassbender and was a nightmarish descent into what happens if you run across the wrong gang of ‘hoodies’ while on a nice weekend away with the missus.
At just 18, O’Connell was a total film-stealer, rightly winning several industry awards for his performance, and he repeated the trick in the Michael Caine revenge movie Harry Brown. Over the next few years, he built a reputation as an actor of prodigious talent in films across genres, which was enough to earn him his first leading role in the Angelina Jolie-directed prisoner of war film Unbroken in 2014, and again, he was nominated for awards.
One role he might have been destined to play, and indeed had the part agreed, was of Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder in the biopic of his life: Twisting My Melon. The script had been penned by Control and Back to Black screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh, who also hailed from Ryder’s native Manchester and looked like it was all set to go ahead until it was halted in 2024 due to creative disputes.
The actor told NME of his admiration for Ryder, saying, “Fucking hell, man, I was listening to his music as a kid. At 13, I used to DJ his music. What he did as a working-class lad from Manchester-slash-Salford it’s colossal. He’s a working-class hero that people wrote off from the beginning. Even if you don’t have anything in common with him, there’s enough in his story to garner sympathy, to garner fascination. In a lot of ways, he’s one in a million.”
Ryder went from working on a building site as a teenager to forming the Happy Mondays and releasing the first EP on Factory Records back in 1985. A leading group in the rave revolution of the early ‘90s, as a band, they were never far from drug-taking, and it led to Ryder’s eventual heroin addiction, although he went sober in the early 2000s and hasn’t looked back since.
O’Connell, however, did manage to make his own movie about Manchester’s 1990 music culture with Weekender, released in 2011, although it wasn’t a success, and attracted poor reviews.
