Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal have been Want to do “The History of Sound” (Out September 12, from Mubi) for five years. But the two actors were both demanding that it continued to be pushed back until they finally became available at the same time.
Now O’Connor is in the odd position of having to market four films coming out this fall. Is he tired? “Yes, I am,” he said at Zoom shortly after Tellurid Film Festival. “I have maxed out a bit.”
The two actors met during the pandemic, on Zoom, after O’Connor saw “normal people” and which many of us thought he discovered an exciting young talent. He emailed his American agent: “You have to see this child. He’s amazing.” His agent had already signed him. It also turns out that Mescal had seen O’Connor as well. The two became famous and have been Chums ever since. (Check out their funny recent performance on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.”)
“Sound history” Director Oliver Hermanus Went on mainly the first draft of the script about two folk music collectors in Love, Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor) who travel South Trawling for cool songs to record after the after -time. “It’s the first script that Ben Shattuck had ever written,” said O’Connor. “We all loved the short story. He delivered a script about a month later, and it was perfect, miraculously. Paul and I were constantly inaccessible, and we both refused to do it with someone else. So we would get a date in, and then we kicked down the road, and then would some other job. We shot all my things first.
The two men reunited at Telluride over Labor Day. It was O’Connor’s second time at the festival, after “La Chimera” two years ago. Then he could participate because he had shot Max Walker-Silvermans “Reconstruction” (Bleecker Street, November 7) nearby. The Micro Budget Indie (Sundance 2025) about a farm society that recovered from fire fires had winded a permit to shoot under the actor’s strike. “”Reconstruction“Be one of the most moving movie experiences I’ve ever had,” O’Connor said. “There is a hopefulness to it. It’s a small crew, and we were opened in the middle of nowhere in a city called Alamosa in Colorado. I went out there to work on a ranch a little before we started.”
“The story of sound,” while involving a romance, is not openly sexy. The two men fall in love for a while, but it is an intellectual relationship, a shared love for music. Mescals Lionel is more comfortable with its sexuality than O’Connors David. “At one point David says:” Worry about this? “” Said O’Connor. “It is obviously something he is considering. We later know that he is married. He is fighting with his sexuality sometimes. David feels shame for a number of reasons. I was drawn to the story because I thought the immediate intellectual attraction was exciting and refreshing. I also loved the idea of exploring the vision and music was also associated.
O’Connor had lost someone he cared deeply a year before. “In recent years,” La Chimera, “much of the work I have done, has tried to calculate it. What” history of sound “grabbed for me was the idea of our memories about someone. Paul and I would often talk about the scenes we did. For joy and fun and playfulness they have.”
In both “The History of Sound” and “Mastermind“(October 17, Mubi) O’Connor, who grew up in western England, had to maneuver the mouth around an American accent,” with great difficulties, “he said.” I’ve lost the accent now. But the letter R is swallowed. You do some gymnastics in your mouth to say the letter R. It is extended, while the American accent is a relaxed R, and it is so difficult for me to move my mouth in the way it is intended to be for an American accent. It takes me a long time to get it right. “
After he shot “The History of Sound” in January and February 2024, O’Connor went off and made the press’s “Challengers” and “La Chimera” and then went with Rian Johnson’s Ensemble for “Knives Out”, followed by Massachusetts Heist Caper “The Mastermind” at the end of the year.
It is obvious that O’Connor is a Kelly Reichardt fan. “She makes the movies I want to watch,” he said. I think they are so fun. And there are often tragedy, and there are often everyday elements and sometimes, even, as in our movie, when I post the pictures in that barn, that shot is completely ridiculous. I like to sit with something. I don’t like being rushed when I look at things. And Kelly makes it so beautiful. Making that kind of role is worried about me. “
“Mastermind” was filmed at 35 mm in long shoots and submerged O’Connor, which was born in 1990, in the 70s. His character, Mooney, wears checkered shirts and Brown Corduroy and runs a gold ’64 Chevy Nova. “These cars are chaotic,” he said. “They are so difficult to drive, they are beautiful machines. But the wheel, it takes about three full turns to take a little right turn. Kelly and I spent a long time watching documentaries and sharing photographs and works of art from the period.”
Mooney is the father of young boys who handle (poorly) with male responsibility, because he does not fulfill his role as a provider and does not go to war. “There is this political, problematic idea after the 1960s about our responsibility for peace and the Vietnam War,” O’Connor said. “He is too old to be called. He is unemployed. He is an artist. And men who are artists who do not work, it is shame on it. He has a huge ego and low self -esteem. That period did something like Mooney.”
Reichardt and O’Connor took a long time to find out which works of art Mooney would steal. “Arthur Dove is a great artist, but at that time his work was not worth anything,” O’Connor said. “You will not be rich quickly from some Arthur pigeons, especially at that time. They are of a special taste. Mooney would not steal a picasso, because it is mainstream, he is full of ego. Yes, the big heist meets the ego. But also,” if I should steal art, I want people to know that I am an art. “So Arthur Dove meets it.
Next up: The roleist of the untitled Steven Spielberg Science-Fiction movie (Universal, June 12, 2026) Written by David Koepp Includes Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Emily Blunt and Colman Domingo, and O’Connor. “It’s Spielberg on his best,” said O’Connor. “There could not be a more Spielberg movie. On my first day on set with him, I stood in a non -description place, and it was rain, drops that came from the roof of this place and a large beam of light from a car raft. And some smoke. I thought:” This is so spiel mountain. “I had a brilliant experience.
O’Connor plays a priest in “Wake up Dead Man” (November 26, Netflix), the third part of Rian Johnson’s series “Knives Out”, along with Daniel Craig, Kerry Washington, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin and Andrew Scott. “It’s a fantastic stacked role,” he said, “and I was just part of it.”
Joel Coen’s second solo excursion “Jack of Spades” is halfway by shooting in Scotland. “The energy on set is focused,” said O’Connor. “The experience of being directed by him may be one of the greatest I’ve had.”
There is a world where O’Connor would escape and disappear, come back to his garden in western England, make pots and not act for a long time. But it is an alternative universe. “I started in the theater, with a large number of years of audition and audition and was rejected and rejected, was at the Royal Shakespeare Company, or in Donmar and balanced it with working at pubs and restaurants,” said O’Connor. “What it does to you is that when a job is done, you really think this can be the last, and if you have imposter -syndrome, as I do, and as most actors do, you will, this next will be the one where they go ‘ah, we were wrong. He is junk.’ So you have always got that needle in the back of your mind, which makes it difficult.
He admits that he may have overturned himself in one sentence: “There is an element of mystery, which we may have lost, and the idea of an event movie that comes out feels like a distant thing,” he said. He returns to theater in Clifford Odet’s “Golden Boy” at West End. “You won’t watch four movies come out at the same time for a little while. That’s all I say.”
