The Disney movie Josh O’Connor is weirdly obsessed with: “I can’t even tell you”
People would be lying if they said they didn’t have at least one favourite Disney film. Regardless of the opinions of the company, the studio and the efforts they’re releasing these days, there’s no denying that in the world of animation, they’ve created some of the best movies.
And so it’s unsurprising when a famous actor or filmmaker includes a Disney movie among their favourites. Jeremy Renner includes The Jungle Book in his top movies, while both LaKeith Stanfield and Christopher Nolan (yes, you read that right) named The Lion King as inspirational.
So the fact that Josh O’Connor has consistently picked Disney’s Ratatouille as one of his favourites isn’t necessarily that weird. Ratatouille is one of those Disney Pixar films that seems to be taken more seriously than a lot of the others, alongside the like of Up and Toy Story. People seem to treat it like a serious film instead of just another Disney movie. So fair play to O’Connor, he’s got good taste.
What is weird, however, is the actor’s sheer obsession with the movie. During the press run for a little movie called Challengers, O’Connor managed to mention the movie no less than six (6!) times. It actually comes up so much that his cast mates start to join in on it, and it begins to feel a little like some sort of PR stunt *takes off tinfoil hat*.
He first mentions the film about a man being puppeted by a foodie rat in a TikTok video promoting a Vogue interview, claiming he was surprised Zendaya “loves the film Ratatouille as much as I love the film Ratatouille.”
Then, during their TotalFilm interview, it comes out that the three cast members would blow off the tension of filming Challengers by watching the Disney movie on film nights. In reference to these nights, O’Connor manages an off-the-cuff mention of the movie when chatting to VMan. “I can’t remember if you saw the apartment I had in Boston – you must have because you came over to watch Ratatouille,” he remarks to Zendaya.
Then in not one but three (3!) Letterboxd interviews, O’Connor can only seem to talk about the bloody rat movie. The Letterboxd team must have been trying everything to get him to talk about literally anything else. He names it as one of his ‘Four Favourites”, manages to spend the entire five-minute interview with his castmates talking about just Ratatouille, and, of course, in the video discussing his four recent watches, he brings it up once again.
It starts to seem likely that he, Zendaya and Mike Faist are all in on some joke that began with their first Ratatouille movie night. Maybe it’s linked to the first time O’Connor’s name and Ratatouille came up together. And actually, it wasn’t even from the actor himself. Way back in 2020, in the comments of a Netflix interview about The Crown, someone pointed out that “Josh could easily play [Ratatouille protagonist] Alfredo Linguini”.
*Puts tinfoil hat back on*…Maybe this has all been some ploy by O’Connor, after seeing said comment, to get himself cast in a live-action version of the movie. But that’s not to say he doesn’t love it. After all, even back in 2021, he was discussing the effect the film had on him.
Talking to Grazia about the movie scenes that make him cry, he could barely describe the moment that the titular Ratatouille dish is made for Anton Ego, and it brings him right back to his childhood, a la Proust’s madeleines. If anything, this simply strengthens my theory that the actor is setting himself up for a starring role in his favourite movie. Watch this spot.
