Josh O'Connor
Josh O'Connor is an actor, born 1990.
Small British parts came first, and there were a lot of them: a constable in Ripper Street (2012), a member of the dining club in The Riot Club (2014), a palace guard in Cinderella (2015), a supporting turn in Florence Foster Jenkins (2016). Steady visibility arrived with ITV's The Durrells, where he played Larry Durrell from 2016 to 2019.
The breakthrough was God's Own Country (2017), as Johnny Saxby, a closeted sheep farmer, and it won him the British Independent Film Award for best actor. It also defined the thing he does better than anyone else his age: men who cannot say the thing. His characters carry an unspoken sentence around with them, and the performance lives in the effort of not saying it.
He can play that as comedy or as tragedy. In Emma. (2020), Mr. Elton's wounded pride is the joke. In The Crown, the young Prince Charles has exactly the same withholding and it is the whole sadness of the part.
Challengers (2024) changed his register, casting him as Patrick Zweig, a charming freeloader with nothing hidden at all, and the run since has been enviable: La Chimera (2023), Lee (2024), a priest in Wake Up Dead Man (2025), plus The Mastermind, The History of Sound and Rebuilding, all dated 2025. Very few actors get a year that looks like that.
Movies (22)
- Disclosure Day (2026)
- Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)
- Cinderella (2015)
- Challengers (2024)
- Rebuilding (2025)
- Emma. (2020)
- The Mastermind (2025)
- The History of Sound (2025)
- God's Own Country (2017)
- Lee (2024)
- La Chimera (2023)
- National Theatre Live: Romeo and Juliet (2021)
- Florence Foster Jenkins (2016)
- Mothering Sunday (2021)
- Hope Gap (2019)
- The Program (2015)
- The Riot Club (2014)
- Hide and Seek (2014)
- Aisha (2022)
- Only You (2019)
- Bonus Track (2024)
- Bridgend (2015)
TV (5)
Where to start with Josh O'Connor
Two entry points, depending on what you want from him. For the actor, God's Own Country: it is the performance everything else gets measured against, physical and nearly wordless, and it does not flatter him. For the star, Challengers, where he is very funny and completely shameless.
The Crown sits in the middle and is the most watched thing he has done. His Charles is the best argument the series ever made for taking its subject seriously.
After that, follow the strangeness. La Chimera is the oddest film on the list, an Italian picture that treats a shabby Englishman as a kind of divining rod, and it is the one I would push hardest. Emma. is the comic proof, Mothering Sunday the quiet one, and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery the most accessible of the recent roles. Skip The Durrells unless you want four years of pleasant Corfu sunshine, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to want.