The two actors Josh O’Connor dreams of emulating: “No stone was left unturned”
You might think Josh O’Connor has emerged out of nowhere over the past few years, his leading part in La Chimera propelling him towards various major movie roles, including Challengers, The Mastermind, and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, but he’s been chipping away at his career for years now.
Since the early 2010s, O’Connor has been spreading himself across theatre, film, and television, his credits ranging from the British drama The Riot Club and Disney’s live-action Cinderella, as well as the TV series The Durrells. You might recognise him for playing Charles in The Crown, or perhaps you caught him in the queer Yorkshire love story God’s Own Country – a triumph of a performance that not enough people have seen.
So, O’Connor has been around, even if his ascension into the Hollywood spotlight seems to have only just begun. With four big roles in 2025 alone, the actor has reached new heights, proving his versatility with some strikingly different performances across each.
This is entirely intentional, though, and O’Connor isn’t simply picking up any project that comes his way. Talking to W Magazine, he explained, “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, who could make a dramatic turn and then be comedic.”
2025 has seen O’Connor play a cowboy who reunites with his former wife and daughter in Rebuilding, a folk musician who falls in love with another man in The History of Sound, an art thief in The Mastermind, and a priest in Wake Up Dead Man. Clearly, he doesn’t want to box himself into a specific genre, although he shows a tendency to appear in films that are considerably more artful than they are box-office fodder.
Taking inspiration from Postlethwaite, whose career spanned The Last of the Mohicans to Brassed Off and Inception, and Wilder, who could do something like a Mel Brooks comedy equally as well as his unforgettable portrayal of Willy Wonka, O’Connor clearly wants to be part of the big leagues.
“I want to be able to look back on my career and go, ‘No stone was left unturned,’” he added. Considering that he has already ticked off a variety of genres, even working on a few projects from other countries, like the Danish drama Bridgend and Alice Rohrwacher’s Italian La Chimera, it seems like he’s heading in the right direction.
What’s next for O’Connor? Perhaps a horror film is on the horizon – you can certainly picture him in a Robert Eggers movie – or maybe a film where he speaks an entirely different language; he’s clearly up for a challenge, and it’s this mindset that will no doubt take him far.
What we do know is that he’ll be leading the next Steven Spielberg film, Disclosure Day, alongside Emily Blunt and Colin Firth, which will surely elevate his star power to even greater heights, and while he might have taken O’Connor over a decade to reach a place of Hollywood stardom, if he keeps taking on versatile roles at the rate he’s going, it seems like an Oscar nomination will come knocking before he knows it.
