“No stone was left unturned”: the pair of polar opposite actors who shaped Josh O’Connor’s career
It’s quite a nice little niche to carve out, being an actor who makes fantastic ‘word of mouth’ movies, films that might not be big box office draws but that the critics drool over and will build up a following over time. Josh O’Connor has made a few of them over the last five years, and his stock is rising because of it.
It’s rising fast enough in fact for him to have gone from ITV Sunday night fare to a lead role in a Steven Spielberg blockbuster, this year’s Disclosure Day alongside Emily Blunt and Colin Firth in a film that we really, really hope is good, because when he gets it right, there’s still nobody who does big screen popcorn movies quite like Spielberg.
O’Connor will play a whistleblowing cybersecurity expert in the new movie, landing in cinemas next month, about which actual details have been frustratingly sparse, save for a trailer that didn’t tell us much other than for some reason a couple of hundred people on a plane will be simultaneously watching a weather forecast.
But a proper, huge Hollywood film will definitely go nicely on O’Connor’s CV that is already full of critically acclaimed movies like A24’s arty heist effort The Mastermind from last year, plus the highly rated comedy drama La chimera from 2023 and the steamy tennis romp Challengers from Luca Guadagnino opposite Zendaya.
That kind of variety is illustrated by his acting influencers, as he told W Magazine recently, saying, “It’s always been a dream of mine to have a diverse collection of projects like the actors that I looked up to. The Pete Postlethwaites and the Gene Wilders [of the world], who could make a dramatic turn and then be comedic. I want to be able to look back on my career and go, ‘No stone was left unturned’.”
Actors certainly don’t come much more disparate than Postlethwaite and Wilder, although they did somewhat surprisingly appear together in a rightly forgotten TV movie adaptation of Alice in Wonderland back in 1999 alongside other luminaries like Ben Kingsley, Martin Short and Whoopi Goldberg.
Postlethwaite was an English character actor who made the jump from British TV to Hollywood in the 1990s, putting in some superb performances in movies like The Usual Suspects, Amistad, Daniel Day-Lewis’s In the Name of the Father, for which he picked up an Academy Award, and was equally brilliant in one of his final films ever, Ben Affleck’s Boston thriller The Town.
On the other hand, Wilder was one of America’s finest comic movie actors in the 1970s and ‘80s, plus of course he achieved global recognition as Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory from 1971, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. He also made a string of popular comedies with Mel Brooks, including 1967’s The Producers, Young Frankenstein and the western parody Blazing Saddles, the three of which picked up seven Academy Award nominations, plus an Oscar win for Brooks on The Producers for ‘Best Screenplay’.
Aside from his Spielberg sci-fi, O’Connor also has a film called Three Incestuous Sisters in the works, which promises to ruffle some feathers, featuring three of the leading Hollywood women of the moment in Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson and Saoirse Ronan. It’s an adaptation of a 2005 graphic novel by Audrey Niffenegger, who wrote The Time Traveller’s Wife, and tells the story of three siblings fighting over a handsome young lighthouse keeper with deadly results.
