Jack O'Connell Says You Can Never Read Too Much

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On February 17, 2004, Todd Willingham was put to death at Huntsville’s Texas State Penitentiary for the murder of his three daughters by arson, accused of dousing his house in accelerant early one morning just before Christmas and setting it ablaze while his girls slept in their bedroom. Like many inmates on death row, he insisted on his innocence until the very end. Also like a lamentably large number of prisoners, he was most likely telling the truth. Five years later, David Grann meticulously recounted Willingham’s case and trial and the aftermath in The New Yorker, offering a damning portrait of a justice system that rushed to convict and execute an innocent man. “I think it’s one of the worst predicaments you could possibly find yourself in as a human,” says Jack O’Connell, who plays Willingham in the new film Trial by Fire, “to be wrongfully tried and charged and found guilty of something, especially something like that—and it potentially happens every day.”

Directed by the Oscar winner Edward Zwick, Trial by Fire makes a vivid argument for Willingham’s innocence. Witnesses offer testimony on the stand in direct contradiction to their initial statements, a fellow prisoner claims Willingham confessed to the crime clearly in the hopes of winning a reduced sentence for himself, and an author named Elizabeth Gilbert (but not the one who wrote Eat, Pray, Love) who happens to become Willingham’s pen pal tracks down an arson investigator who disproves most of the arguments of the original expert witnesses using updated scientific methods. Based closely on an article that passed through The New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking desk, the film is convincing in its forthrightness, presenting Willingham as just a single example of a situation that is all too common. “Todd is not in a small group there,” O’Connell adds. “His is a case of miscarried justice and the justice system failing him, so I hope the film illustrates that.”

In the wrong hands, Trial by Fire could easily have sunk under the heavy weight of its moral, and the fact that it avoids this fate can be largely credited to O’Connell’s deeply humanizing performance. The 28-year-old English actor has made a specialty of sorts of exposing the pain behind his characters’ aggression, his rugged exterior masking a sensitive core—he played a skinhead in an early role in This Is England and a magnetically violent prisoner in Starred Up, to name just two examples—and he brings a profound maturity to his performance as Willingham, a bereaved father who finds imprisonment piled on top of his already devastating loss. “One of the original draws to the role is that this guy didn’t get a voice,” O’Connell explains. “He didn’t really get properly represented in court. I do feel like his voice was stripped. You have to wonder what it feels like when you know you’re going to die, when you know your life is so insignificant that you can’t even get a proper, thorough trial. I feel like he was categorized quite quickly as this hell-raising figure so it was up to me to dig further and see if that was accurate or not. I don’t think it was.”

To get into character as Willingham, O’Connell traded extensive emails with Laura Dern, who plays Gilbert. He also spoke with Grann and the real-life Gilbert, who shared the letters she exchanged with Willingham, along with poems he wrote and drawings he made. “There was a lot of information to be taken from them,” he explains. “Obviously they were open to interpretation, but if you read between the lines, sometimes you can get clues as to how his mind works, who he is as a person, what’s important to him at the time, what he’s emotional about, what he’s unemotional about.”

That kind of intense investigation was not new to O’Connell, who approaches all of his roles with the same dedication. “Study, study, study, study,” he advises. “Read as much as you can. You can never read too much. You have to do as much research as possible.” It might seem like a surprisingly analytical method for an actor whose greatest performances have been grippingly visceral, but it has been clear since at least his early breakout on the epochal teen drama Skins that he is exceedingly thoughtful and meticulous in all of his work.

O’Connell will say that he started acting by chance, forced into a compulsory drama program at his Catholic school in Derby where he grew up and discovering an instant affinity. “I was always up for doing school nativities and stuff like that,” he recalls. “It was never something that I shied away from. I know some people aren’t up for speaking in front of people, but I guess I had that show-off nature as a kid.” By twelve years old, he was actively seeking out opportunities to act, even if he had to keep it secret at first. “I auditioned for the school play and didn’t tell anyone about it,” he laughs, “because all of my mates played football and they had an opinion or two on the arts.” He ended up enrolled in the audition-only Central Junior Television Workshop, which offers lessons to aspiring performers and counts Felicity Jones, Samantha Morton, and Joe Dempsie among its alumni. “I had a real stroke of good fortune there to be honest with you because I wonder if I would’ve found a path into it without them initiatives,” he says about his first acting classes. “I recently learned that the school I went to stopped doing drama altogether, so I think me getting into it then was a sign of the times. The government was financing the arts a lot more within state schools and working-class communities, whereas now it’s been stripped back by our pompous Tory government.”

At eighteen, he joined Skins in its third season as the hard-partying, womanizing James Cook alongside Kaya Scodelario as part of the second generation of characters. Already a nationwide phenomenon, the show’s success only increased the pressure on him and his fellow newcomers. “I don’t think we were naive enough to think that automatically guaranteed us a good reception,” he says. “I was definitely relieved that it went down well. I think it took two or three episodes for people to get into it. The first one, people just started pulling it apart and harking back to the original cast and slating us. The internet’s a bit of a dark place, but by about the third episode, it felt like we were onto a winner.” Still, he says the experience was nothing less than formative for him, both personally and professionally. “It was university without debt and without the lectures,” he laughs. “It was surreal. We were living the dream then—good fucking days.”

He left the show after two whirlwind seasons and has been crafting a fascinatingly varied career ever since. His international breakthrough came in 2014 with Angelina Jolie’s directorial début Unbroken, in which he played the Olympian-turned-prisoner of war Louis Zamperini alongside Domhnall Gleeson and Garrett Hedlund. His next feature was Jodie Foster’s Money Monster with Julia Roberts and Outlander’s Caitriona Balfe, in which he channeled the rage of the ninety-nine percent as a man who takes George Clooney’s television host hostage after losing money in an investment gone wrong on the latter’s advice. As an actor who plans to direct in the future himself, O’Connell says he paid special attention to the way Jolie and Foster worked as performers who made the move behind the camera. “I noticed that a lot of the time, it offers them a level of empathy,” he explains.

O’Connell is planning to take a well-deserved break over the next few months, traveling across Europe in a trailer until he begins preparations later this summer for The North Water, the forthcoming series from 45 Years, Lean on Pete, and Looking director Andrew Haigh. Later this year, he’ll appear as a boxer in Max Winkler’s Jungleland with Charlie Hunnam and alongside Anthony Mackie, Kristen Stewart, and Zazie Beetz in the Jean Seberg drama Against All Enemies. And after making his West End début in 2017 opposite Sienna Miller in Tennessee Williams’s classic Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he says he is looking to get back on stage again soon, even if, hard as it is to believe considering his consistently packed schedule, he still worries about being forgotten. “The only thing I will say is that when you’re on stage, you’re not making movies,” he offers, “and Hollywood has got a very short-term fucking memory for someone like myself if you ask me.”

Given O’Connell’s vast body of work and his vibrant performances, it would be hard to find anyone to dispute his status as one of the most captivating actors of his generation. One person who would seem to disagree, however, is O’Connell himself, as he modestly explains that he continues to approach each project as if he were a newcomer still looking to get established rather than the genuine star that he is. “You’re looking at what you have just done and what’s about to come out and if the thing you’re about to do is in any way too similar, that could be a factor,” he elaborates about choosing what he wants to take on next. “I would like to at least demonstrate some form of range hopefully.”

Trial by Fire is out today.