In The Crown Season Three, Josh O’Connor Plays a Young Prince Charles in Love
Moments before I am due to meet Josh O’Connor, the skies over North London open with such vengeance that we have no choice but to begin our interview sheltering in his car. If the 29-year-old actor finds this awkward, he doesn’t show it. “Let’s sit here until it calms down,” he suggests cheerfully as he tries (and for several minutes fails) to parallel park, then roots around for a spare umbrella to lend me.
During a break in the rain, we make a dash for the nearest pub. O’Connor is dressed for the weather in a green Loewe parka (his slightly gawky, oversize good looks have made him the face of the brand’s menswear line), which he’s paired with department-store pants borrowed from his grandma. The untraditional wardrobe choice feels appropriate coming from an actor who describes the “fickleness of masculinity” as the unifying thread running through his otherwise eclectic CV.
O’Connor grew up in the spa town of Cheltenham, surrounded by an extended family of artists and writers. “I have no memory of feeling strong and rugged at any point,” he says. “I’ve been considering masculinity my whole life.” Since graduating from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in 2011, he’s found increasingly high-profile roles through which to further that investigation. His first big-box-office appearance was in The Riot Club (2014), a film about the violent and misogynistic culture of an all-male drinking society. For four seasons on The Durrells in Corfu he played a pompous writer obsessed with the trappings of the Great Male Genius. In his breakout role in God’s Own Country (2017), he zipped from one end of the class spectrum to the other, pulling in awards for his portrayal of a self-destructive Yorkshire farmer who falls in love with a Romanian migrant worker. Critics hailed it as the British Brokeback Mountain, but for O’Connor it was a film about men being “emotionally inarticulate” regardless of their sexuality.
Does Prince Charles—whom O’Connor plays in the current season of The Crown—have a crisis of masculinity? “I think Charles is deeply emotional,” O’Connor says. “His father, Prince Philip, might call it soft. I would call it strong but in a different way.” Learning about the prince’s tabloid-harried love life was also instructive for an actor on the cusp of true fame: O’Connor makes a point of not naming his girlfriend (who works in advertising) in the press, although photos of the couple are readily Googleable. His phone background shows her at home, standing in front of a recently purchased abstract canvas; the two live in a home filled with art and ceramics—particularly O’Connor’s grandma’s figurative sculptures, which he describes as his favorite things “in the entire world.” He draws to de-stress and cooks a lot—slightly altering the recipes from a Persian cookbook he knows almost by heart. Who is the tastemaker in their home? “Me,” he mouths jokingly, then backtracks for the record: “We’re really lucky and have very similar tastes.”
Lots of actors get impatient between jobs, but I get the feeling that O’Connor would take well to “resting,” should he ever get the chance—2020 also brings O’Connor’s turn as Mr. Elton in a screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. While filming for The Crown in Scotland, he managed to fit in six swims in the wild for the mental health charity MIND (he’s trying to do 30 in his 30th year) as well as an overly ambitious solo hike that ended with him camping overnight on a remote stretch of coastline, miles from cell reception. “I was looking at my tent on this beach as the storm was coming in, thinking, What have I done?” he tells me. “Total cock-up.” But he is clearly cheered by the memory. “It’s a secret dream of mine, to sack it all off,” he admits. We bond over a shared ambition of finding the time to learn how to throw a pot. “It’s looks simple, but it’s not,” he enthuses. “It’s really hard!”
Although O’Connor romanticizes the prospect of a Walden-esque retreat, I simultaneously get the sense that the young actor is raring to seize this moment: His star is rising on both sides of the Atlantic, thanks to The Crown. There are lots of evening pottery classes in London, I reassure him. O’Connor grins; he’s already done the research and found a couple of promising courses in nearby Hackney. “See you there!”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
