JOSH O'CONNOR

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Actors like to talk about committing to a role, but it’s hard to imagine many demonstrating the dedication of Josh O’Connor, who spent a month living on his own in a country cottage to prepare for God’s Own Country, in which he plays a young farmer in England’s West Yorkshire county who falls in love with a Romanian migrant worker who comes under his employ. “I try and become the character as much as I can and then live it,” he explains. “I talked the accent all the time and tried to forget Josh and tried to be Johnny Saxby the whole shoot. The character’s totally isolated and he doesn’t know how to talk to people, so I wanted to isolate myself and not have any of my friends around and just be on my own.”

O’Connor, twenty-seven, also spent those weeks learning the ins and outs of farm life, to the extent that he often ended up helping out on the working farm where they filmed both on- and offscreen. “We did everything, every single farming scene is us,” he laughs. “We delivered lambs, I put my hand up the ass of a cow. You’d be shooting a scene one second and then the farmer would come down and need a hand so you’d call cut and then you were delivering a lamb off camera. It was the best way to film because you’re totally in character and you’re just living it.”

In God’s Own Country, O’Connor’s Johnny works exhaustingly, if less than diligently, on the family farm he shares with his father and grandmother. He escapes from the daily drudgery through binge drinking and anonymous sex with other men, directionless in life and uninterested in examining his unfulfilled desires until the arrival of Gheorghe, played by Alec Secareanu. After a hostile beginning, they eventually become friends and then lovers, and there is a refreshing honesty to their relationship, which is at turns rough then tender, and smartly avoids the expected tortured coming-out. “I was blown away by how unique it was,” O’Connor recalls of first reading the script by Francis Lee, who also directed. “It was so detailed and there was not much dialogue, but it was very descriptive and brutal. There was not a single bit of me in that character, so I quite wanted to do it.”

A relatively modest film, God’s Own Country became an overnight success when it premiered at Sundance in January, and went on to win an award for best direction. It played on the international festival circuit in the following months, and opened in the United Kingdom in September to reviews labeling it the “best British film of the year.” “With these indie films, every stage is a surprise,” O’Connor says. “It’s crazy that a small, little film can have this much impact.”

O’Connor credits his native England’s current political climate in part for the film’s success, saying that with the vote for Brexit—which came down on the day the crew watched the first edit—turned it into a “period piece, but purely by accident.” Gheorghe is able to work in the United Kingdom thanks only to the European Union’s policy of open borders, and the film makes it clear that, far from stealing a job that would’ve otherwise gone to a native worker, his presence adds a valuable new perspective on the farm. “This film shows exactly the reason why immigration is really important, and how important it is for society,” O’Connor explains. “That’s why I think it’s hit home so hard.”

Raised in Gloucester in western England, O’Connor studied drama at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School—as his second choice. “I just didn’t get into art school,” he laughs. “My grandfather is a sculptor and I wanted to do that, so I applied to five art schools and two drama schools, and I got into drama school but not art school, so I went.” While acting is now his day job, as it were, he continues to create sculptures in his spare time. “I work with found materials and create objects of interest to me,” he explains. “Well, sometimes they’re interesting to me, and sometimes I find them really ugly, which I like.”

Despite his classical training and a childhood spent attending the theater, O’Connor, who now lives in southeast London near Peckham, says he quickly discovered that he wanted to work in film. He recalls being particularly struck by the beginning of Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic There Will Be Blood. “I remember watching There Will Be Blood with Daniel Day-Lewis and the long opening scene where he’s chiseling away in the pits,” he says. “You watch him slowly for so long and I remember when I watched that film for the first time on DVD, I watched that first scene, which is about twenty minutes with no dialogue and no other characters, and then I paused and I rewound and I watched and rewound and watched that opening sequence about ten times. It was that moment when I realized film could be real and authentic, and that’s what was really interesting to me.”

After small roles on a number of television shows, he appeared in Lone Scherfig’s The Riot Club with Sam Claflin, Max Irons, Douglas Booth, Olly Alexander, Ben Schnetzer, and Matthew Beard, a film that he credits as a major early boost in his career. “At the time, everyone our age wanted to be in this film and I was the only guy of the main ten boys who wasn’t already known and on the scene,” he recalls. “I was the underdog, so it was definitely a really important moment for me.” Next came small parts on Peaky Blinders, with Cillian Murphy, Helen McCrory, and Finn Cole<,/a> and Ripper Street, and with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant in Florence Foster Jenkins, before his starring role as the author Lawrence Durrell of Alexandria Quartet fame in the British series The Durrells in Corfu.

Filmed on the eponymous Greek island, the show recounts a period when the Durrells—Larry, his three siblings, and their single mother—decamped from freezing England to the sunny Mediterranean to save money, as originally recounted in a series of memoirs by the youngest son Gerald. The source material, long popular in England, was already heavily fictionalized, and O’Connor says the attempt was never to reproduce history factually. “As soon as I read it, I thought, ‘Oh there’s no way that we should try and replicate what Lawrence Durrell was really like,’” he recalls. “I don’t look like Lawrence Durrell and it just would have been weird. I think sometimes you have to make your own thing and trust the audience. I never worried about making my own interpretation.”

O’Connor recently wrapped the film Only You, starring with Laia Costa as a couple struggling to conceive a baby, and even as the success of God’s Own Country continues to grow—the film picked up eleven British Independent Film nominations earlier this month, including one for O’Connor for Best Actor—he is clearly ready to look ahead to his next project, whatever that may be and wherever it may take him. “I remember two years ago I did an interview and someone asked me, ‘What do you think about doing blockbusters?’ and at the time I was like, ‘Oh, I’d never do blockbusters, that’s not me,’” he says. “But actually, of course you would if it’s a good story. If there’s a good narrative and a good character, you wouldn’t say no. If your focus has nothing to do with the scale or whether you’re living in Los Angeles or London or New York, that’s what you want to do, just good stories.”

God’s Own Country is out now.