MARYLEBONE, LONDON, is what you might call old-school London. The leafy neighborhood is known primarily for being on the British Monopoly board (as a train station, £200) and for being the home of Harley Street, a cluster of private specialist doctors, cosmetic surgeons, and the occasional quack. It’s where C-listers go to look more like B-listers; King George, the monarch in The King’s Speech, got his stutter ironed out here. Recently, though, it’s gotten a reputation for being more chic; The New York Times likened it to the West Village due to its being fashionable, quaint, and cobblestoney. On one January afternoon that sits on the British Weather Matrix somewhere between "bloody nippy" and "fuck-me-it’s-freezing," Josh O’Connor is killing time before his restaurant booking by browsing a set of spoons in a furniture store.
The 28-year-old actor—best known for his breakout role in Francis Lee’s tender, queer West Yorkshire drama God’s Own Country and the BBC’s new six-part adaptation of Les Misérables—is torn between a purely functional set of cutlery and one with teak handles. He strokes the handle of a spoon the way Marie Kondo touches a book’s spine before considering its value to the universe, and flips it over to see how much his dream might cost (too much). If you’re a young guy and you just bought your first apartment, he muses, shouldn’t you get the cutlery you really want?
O’Connor is about to get a lot busier, chiefly as an aged-up Prince Charles in season three of The Crown. People have joked that his ears helped get him the part of the king-in-waiting, and he’s happy to go along with that. “They’re not big, they just…stick out. I grew into them. I like to think the casting director saw them and gave me the part there and then.” When your world’s about to get unrecognizable beyond belief, sweating the small stuff—the spoons-and-forks of our day-to-day lives—has a kind of charm to it.
He’s bought a house that is a spoon's throw away from the city's chicer districts of Shoreditch and Hackney, but is decidedly not in either of them. “It’s a beautiful Victorian conversion,” he explains, dismissing a light fixture that resembles a constellation of stars. “It’s a nice project. I have some free time; I’m becoming obsessed with detail. It has these original floorboards and…there’s a lot of wood in the house. Who knew there were so many kinds? It is a festival of wood,” he proclaims. “It’s kind of everything I dreamed of.”
A couple of years ago, O’Connor was following the well-worn path, popping up in British TV and film: as a closeted, penniless writer in Peaky Blinders, in Matt Smith–era Doctor Who’s terrific Cold War episode, as a Soviet trapped on a downed nuclear sub with a Martian. On the big screen, we saw him in The Riot Club, the debauched, toxic satire of our upper-class system alongside notable "Oh, him!"s like Douglas Booth, Sam Claflin, and Olly Alexander (who pivoted to pop star shortly after). But after God’s Own Country, we started to see him differently, not just as a jobbing actor but as someone who specialized in channeling the worst impulses of masculinity and refracting them back at us.
Director Lee just loved O’Connor’s look. “I think it was his open face and ears,” he tells me in an e-mail. “Josh is the sweetest, most open, funny, clever person and he is a transformative actor, whose great skill is to be a shape shifter,” he adds. “I’m also obsessed with hands. I’d always imagined [Johnny Saxby] would have something significant about his hands, formed from the work and weather. Josh has huge, meat plate sized hands that really stuck with me.”
We head to lunch at Fischer's, an Austrian restaurant known for its schnitzels, sausages, and brötchen, a place that serves hot chocolate with a hearty jug of hot, full-cream milk. The interior answers any queries about what a 1920s railway dining car might look like if designed by Wes Anderson; there are giant oil paintings and mounted animal heads, staff dressed in racing green waistcoats over white shirts that look rakish. It is elegant and unstuffy, and Josh often comes here when he’s in town.
He begins to explain how happy he is by way of flexing those meat plates in front of me. “Last year I was so stressed with the awards, I got really bad eczema all over my hands. I was really ill from it,” he says. The skin was red and sore, and he was completely wiped out. Now? They are smooth and he is thinner, and maybe it’s the gorgeous lighting, but he glows; his sharp cheekbones make Benedict Cumberbatch’s jawline look like pudding.
The stress came from the furious campaigning for God’s Own Country across the awards circuit. In it, Josh played Johnny Saxby, a young sheep farmer in rural Yorkshire whose world is changed when a Romanian worker, Gheorghe (Alec Secăreanu), comes to assist on the farm. It is a story of hope and torment, of family and the responsibilities of working-class families, and it’s a queer film in which the camera refuses to shy away from the sex, which is beautiful and brutal, tender and occasionally feral.
“There are LGBTQ films that are conservative when it comes to onscreen sex,” O’Connor says when I bring up one scene in the mud. “The way this is shot, the intimacy of it, I think it would be weird if you never saw such a huge aspect of Johnny's transition and transformation. It [was] sexual. It's a big part of same-sex relationships, but cinematically, it's also a brilliant tool to show people how this character is changing and how a dynamic is changing. I’m proud that we don’t shy away from showing two men having sex.”
Initially, perhaps even reductively, the film was compared to Brokeback Mountain by critics, though the similarities are few (gay men and…livestock?). Brokeback’s world was underpinned by the fear and revulsion of two men in love, and its characters were justifiably haunted by the subsequent deceit. But in God’s Own Country, which draws on Francis Lee’s own experiences being torn between a future on his family’s farm and his desire to go to drama school, the focus is on the self-hatred that exists in Johnny in spite of his acceptance of his sexuality. “He can’t accept the idea of someone loving him,” Josh says. “He has no emotional articulacy, but he’s not closeted. By all accounts, he goes out, has a pint. He’ll fuck a stranger in a toilet, but his tension is that he doesn’t think he deserves any affection. He is numb to it.”
The film won the World Cinema Directing award at Sundance 2017. He and the film picked up accolades at the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA), the Edinburgh Film Festivalm and the Empire magazine awards. At the BAFTAs, it was nominated for Best Outstanding Film but lost to Three Billboards; O’Connor was up for the Rising Star Award, losing to Daniel Kaluuya (though this was the only award put to a public vote). It was puzzling but, he suggests, the time for dwelling on it is over.
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault I didn’t win—that’s just the way it works. If you’re really honest with yourself, you do care, you do want to be acknowledged for your work. But a year later, I can see that it wasn’t good for me…”
He turned up to one party to find they’d named cocktails after each of the nominees: His, the "Cocktail O’Connor," took gin, lengthened it with tonic, and garnished with a lime wedge, which sounds suspiciously like…er...a gin and tonic. “That was odd!” he concedes. “I find those parties quite difficult, because you're forced into...it's like an office Christmas party. It's like a game, we're there to be seen to be there, ticking things off. Obviously, I don't want to criticize people who get a lot out of that—it's important, but still…”
It’s taken up until now, midway through a fish pie topped with piped mashed potato, for him to appreciate the scale of what he’s signed up for—playing Prince Charles, a.k.a. Will and Harry’s dad, a.k.a. the United Kingdom’s future king, on one of Netflix’s biggest shows. Details of The Crown’s third season are scarce, and the plot and the details are as closely guarded as a Game of Thrones or a Star Wars—despite its being based on real things that actually happened to people who are still alive—which feels like the most British thing you could conceive. Just as things are totally unrecognizable for O'Connor compared to last year, so next year will see him in a different place entirely, and maybe it’s wise to enjoy the midday lagers and the perusing of teak-handled utensils now, while he’s not being eyeballed by neighboring diners.
It still feels like early days in the grand scheme of things. But in a short space of time, O'Connor has developed a bit of a tell in his work; men who struggle to find their place in the world, or men who appear privileged yet find themselves outliers all the same. Johnny Saxby faces a familial duty to run his father’s farm, knowing he'll also inherit all of the difficulty in sustaining it one day if he continues to be alone. On Les Misérables, as Marius Pontmercy, he has to contend with being raised in a hostile, conservative family and must find a place in the new world, lest he go down with the old ways. And Charles? “In order for his life to have any meaning, his mother needs to die,” he says. “Until then he's in the wings. And you know, as of today, the Queen is still very much alive.”
Those men, he says, whether working-class or royalty, all feel like they don’t know how to be. And that’s becoming increasingly common. He’s just finished The Descent of Man by the contemporary British artist Grayson Perry, which helped enormously. The book posits that masculinity is a rigid structure ruining all men’s lives, something that “fascinates.” The notion of who and what taught masculinity has helped him figure out his character’s place in society, but it’s also made him think about his own, too. Finishing it, he explains, relieved him of any false duties.
I ask him what kind of pressure he feels, being burdened by masculinity as a construct. “The idea that men have to be: strong, brave, courageous, un-emotional, closed off...[and] not talk about their problems,” he says. “We now know how damaging that is. I think now we are becoming liberated from that.”
This is very much what made playing Johnny so fascinating. Had it been a more straightforward coming-out story, O'Connor wouldn’t necessarily have put himself up for the part. “I have been asked, a few times, should a straight actor play a gay part?” he says. “And every time I have been honest and said...I don’t know. In my head, Johnny was struggling with things beyond his sexuality; it was his isolation, and his emotional articulacy.”
He thinks for a moment. “I'd always be really open about it. Sexuality…is more complicated than we realize. Just as Grayson talks about masculinity not being this steel rod, it’s true of queerness, too; it’s fluid and elastic, but we often don’t really have the tools to articulate that in our culture.”
“I think there would be an issue if the film was a coming-out story, if God's Own Country was framed about the difficulties of him coming out and society not accepting him. But there isn't a hint of that. He's out, by and large; in many ways, his sexuality just isn't part of his identity. He goes out for a pint, he goes and has sex with someone…” he trails off.
The film has a huge fanbase. Fans used to attend all the screenings, sitting in front rows in handmade knitted sweatshirts like the one Georgie has in the film. “It has a happy ending,” he says, smiling. “Let’s be honest, in real life there would be all sorts of problems [with the relationship]." Like Brexit! Francis, though, wanted a happy ending for them.
“Let’s just rejoice in the fact that he did.”
As we walk past diners taking the concept of a long lunch way too literally, one lady’s head swivels as O'Connor bounds toward the door. Maybe she recognizes him—he’s been doing the rounds promoting Les Mis—or maybe she’s just drawn to him, energetic and sunny and grinning. But one thing’s for sure: She won’t be the only one before the year is out.
