Josh O’Connor, the art-house actor caught up in the James Bond race

Josh O'Connor

Photo: Max Surprenant / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 20, 1990 Southampton, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Disclosure Day, Cinderella, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Awards	Emmy · Golden Globe · Critics' Choice · 2 British Independent Film

For most of his career Josh O’Connor has looked like the British actor least likely to be handed a gun and a tuxedo. He made his name delivering lambs on a Yorkshire hillside, digging through Etruscan tombs for Alice Rohrwacher and playing a carpenter who steals paintings badly for Kelly Reichardt. His most famous role, the heir to the throne in The Crown, was a man the series kept telling to wait his turn. And yet this autumn his name sits on the shortlist for the most commercial job in British cinema.

According to Deadline, insiders say O’Connor is one of four actors offered final screen tests by Amazon MGM Studios for the next James Bond, alongside Jack Lowden and Callum Turner. The studio has confirmed nothing and no decision has been announced. Whether or not he gets the part, the report sharpens the question his recent work has been asking anyway: can an actor who spent a decade choosing small, strange, director-led films carry a franchise without turning into someone else?

Southampton is where Joshua Mathias O’Connor was born, on 20 May 1990, but he grew up in Cheltenham, the son of a teacher and a midwife. Art ran in the family: his grandfather was the sculptor John Bunting and his aunt is the writer Madeleine Bunting. He wanted to be a painter, decided he was not good enough, tried rugby and found acting in school plays at St Edward’s School, where one of his classmates was the future FKA Twigs. He has credited the school’s drama department with helping him cope with dyslexia, and went on to train at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

The first years were spent in small parts across British television and in a run of privileged young men, including a Bullingdon-style toff in Lone Scherfig’s The Riot Club (2014). Steady work came as the young writer Lawrence Durrell in The Durrells, which ran from 2016 to 2019. The breakthrough came from somewhere else. In Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (2017) he played Johnny Saxby, a farmer’s son numbing himself with drink until a Romanian migrant worker arrives on the farm. He laboured alongside a Yorkshire farmer between takes and delivered more than a hundred lambs; the film premiered at Sundance and won him the British Independent Film Award for best actor. He won the same award again for Harry Wootliff’s Only You.

Peter Morgan’s The Crown then gave him Prince Charles for the third and fourth seasons, broadcast on Netflix in 2019 and 2020, opposite Olivia Colman as the Queen. O’Connor, who calls himself a republican, “although not in any kind of fist-waving, campaigning way”, told The Guardian he had to advocate for Charles on set because the character is always being told to shut up. The performance won him the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, the Golden Globe and the Critics’ Choice award in 2021. Between seasons he played a comically oily Mr Elton in Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. (2020).

That sympathy is also where the picture gets more complicated. The fourth season, built around the marriage to Diana, gave him the least likeable Charles of the series, and O’Connor himself called the character “horrible” in those episodes while defending a man who had spent his whole life being overlooked. The same split runs through the film work that followed. Critics have backed almost every choice; audiences have often stayed away. Reichardt’s The Mastermind (2025), a deliberately deflated heist film about an amateur art thief in 1970 Massachusetts, earned strong reviews in competition at Cannes and found only a small theatrical audience. Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound (2025), a First World War love story opposite Paul Mescal, drew a long standing ovation on the Croisette and reviews that, even when admiring, found it muted. His reputation rests on precision in films relatively few people pay to see, which is exactly why the Bond reports have landed with such force.

He has been moving towards larger audiences all the same. Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023), in which he plays Arthur, an English archaeologist drawn into a gang of grave robbers in 1980s Tuscany, gave him the lead in an Italian film competing at Cannes. Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (2024), opposite Zendaya and Mike Faist, cast him as Patrick Zweig, a broke tennis player sleeping in his car, and became his widest big-screen exposure. In 2025 he starred in Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding, which he also executive produced, played a young priest under suspicion of murder in Rian Johnson‘s Wake Up Dead Man for Netflix, and in December hosted Saturday Night Live.

This year has been the busiest of his career. In June he appeared in Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure Day as Dr. Daniel Kellner, part of an ensemble led by Emily Blunt with Colin Firth, Eve Hewson and Colman Domingo; the film opened at number one in North America. In January Dior named him a brand ambassador, following nearly a decade with Loewe. Then he went back to the stage as Joe Bonaparte, the violinist who becomes a prizefighter, in Sam Yates’s revival of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy at the Almeida Theatre in London, which closes on 31 October. Reviewers singled out the force of his central performance.

Away from sets, O’Connor lives in Gloucestershire, near Stroud, where he moved in 2023 after years in east London and a spell in New York. In his thirtieth year he swam thirty times around the UK and Ireland to raise money for the mental-health charity Mind, a project called Waterlogged that was inspired by his mother.

The filmed Golden Boy reaches cinemas worldwide through National Theatre Live from 5 November. Two auteur projects are in post-production: Joel Coen’s Jack of Spades, a gothic mystery set in Scotland with Frances McDormand, Lesley Manville and Damian Lewis, and Rohrwacher’s The Three Incestuous Sisters, in which he plays Paris, a lighthouse keeper’s son, opposite Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan and Jessie Buckley. Deadline reports that a Bond decision is expected by the end of the year. Whatever Amazon decides, the next two films on his slate belong to directors who have never needed a spy.

Tags: actors, Steven Spielberg, The Crown, Josh O'Connor, Challengers, Alice Rohrwacher, Disclosure Day, La Chimera