Josh O'Connor Season Has Sprung

Gabriella Paiella
·4 min read
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What does it take to make a leading man? An alchemy of skill, charisma, good looks, masculinity, and presence, in an elusive balance that’s constantly shifting and rearranging itself in response to the culture. The dust has settled, the people have spoken, and this microgeneration’s class of young male movie stars have been established: Timothée Chalamet. Austin Butler. Paul Mescal. Now, with two tremendous performances this spring in Challengers and La Chimera, it’s time to add Josh O’Connor to that lineup.

The 33-year-old British actor first broke out to US audiences in seasons three and four of The Crown, where his surprisingly sympathetic performance as Prince Charles won him an Emmy and a Golden Globe. Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s sexy, electrifying tennis drama, casts him in an entirely different light and is what undoubtedly vaunts him to the next level.

Everything about Challengers feels like an event—it’s Jules and Jim turned up to 11, drenched in sweat, and soundtracked by blood-pumping synths courtesy of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Zendaya plays Tashi Duncan, a former tennis legend-turned-coach who’s trying her damndest to train her pro player husband Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) out of his flop era. She arranges for him to enter in a low-level tournament, which ends up pitting him against the down-on-his-luck Patrick Zweig, Art’s former best friend and Tashi’s former lover, played to sleazebag perfection by O’Connor.

Zendaya, Faist, and O’Connor are all powerhouses, but O’Connor takes my pick for MVP. He’s the movie’s destabilizing force, a tornado of irresistible arrogance. This may be a love triangle, but he’s its sharpest point. O’Connor has said he based Patrick, in part, on pro tennis baddie Nick Kyrgios. I saw in his performance more of something like an early-career Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro—a lovable scamp, the guy you want to hate but can’t.

“It’s really nice to play someone who is just pure outward energy,” O’Connor told GQ’s Olivia Ovenden about Patrick in a profile last year. “I remember when I first read it thinking he’s this tough guy, like a Gallagher brother. But then I remember having a breakthrough where I was convinced he needed to smile. Anytime he’s angry, I’d just whack in a little smile.” Ultimately, those smiles are what made all the difference.

Last month also marked the US release of Alice Rohrwacher’s hypnotizing fable La Chimera. Set in 1980s rural Italy, it tells of a band of tombaroli who raid underground Etruscan tombs and sell the artifacts on the black market. O’Connor plays Arthur, a rumpled English archeologist and the band’s leader who, while not exactly a total sleazebag, is for sure a rogue. As with Challengers, this proves to be O’Connor’s best zone. La Chimera is overlaid with Rohrwacher’s signature veil of magical realism and O’Connor—a stranger in a strange land, wandering around in a rumpled white linen suit and haunted by his lost love Benjamina—only heightens this feeling. The movie is colorful in every sense of the word, but it’s O’Connor at the center who is the most beguiling, transmitting what can feel like centuries of emotion in a single glance.

O’Connor has some other prestigious projects lined up that signal his ascendancy: he and Paul Mescal will be starring as lovers in the WWI-set History of Sound, he’s in another unnamed project playing a cowboy, and he’s rumored to be tapped for Guadagnino’s forthcoming Separate Rooms. Beyond that, he’s struck an enviable balance of exposure. He’s charming in junkets, a Loewe ambassador, and we know that he does ceramics and owns a van named Winnie that he drives around Europe and lives in for stretches of time. That’s about it. And that may be what we want the most from our leading men: a little bit of mystery.

Originally Appeared on GQ

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