About Town
People, Places, Preoccupations
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 29 FEBRUA RY 12, 2020
COURTESY OF NETFLIX
“What’s interesting about
Prince Charles?” wondered
Josh O’Connor when first
asked to play the role on
The Crown. “Now, I think he
is incredible.”Josh O’Connor
J
osh O’Connor has spent the better
part of the past decade pitted against
actors like Eddie Redmayne and Sam
Claflin for lead roles. Says O’Connor,
“Most of the time my reaction [to a script] is
‘Oh my God, how good would it be if Andrew
Garfield played this role?’ And then my agent
has to go, ‘Josh, how good would it be if you got
to play it?’ ” One role that O’Connor knew he
had a good chance at winning: Prince Charles
on seasons three and four of the international
phenom The Crown. He explains, “At the time
I thought that they may well come to me
because of my ears.”
The self-effacing actor, 29, grew up in
Cheltenham, England — known for its horses
and mineral springs — the middle of three
brothers. Having a sculptor for a grandfather
and a ceramicist grandmother, O’Connor at
first believed that he would pursue a
career in the fine arts. “My parents
probably were delighted when I
chose acting, because if there is one
job in the world that is less finan-
cially reliable than acting, it is art.”
He first considered acting as a
career after seeing Daniel Day-Lewis
in My Left Foot — “Watching him
was like having an out-of-body
experience,” he says — and Pete
Postlethwaite in the comedy Brassed
Off! “That was the first time I saw
someone on film that looked like someone I
might know as opposed to a Hollywood actor,”
says O’Connor, who attended the famed drama
school Bristol Old Vic (only 14 students are
admitted annually; Lewis and Olivia Colman
are alumni), which was then taught out of an
old Victorian home. “What would have been
an old bedroom is where you would do voice
lessons,” he explains. His most formative
experience came in his second year, when the
class went on tour in a minibus, staging spon-
taneous performances in towns across the
country, six days a week. “It was like a travel-
ing circus. When I left school, all I wanted was
to buy a van.”VITAL STATS
AGE 29
BORN
Southampton, England
BIG BREAK
2017’s God’s Own Country
REPS
CAA, the U.K.’s
Independent Talent GroupNEXT BIG THING
The budding British star on his
‘sexy priest’ part in the new Emma
and what helped him win the role of
The Crown’s Prince Charles: ‘My ears’
By Mia Galuppo