Josh O’Connor On ‘The Mastermind’, ‘The History Of Sound’, His Secret Spielberg Film & How Harris Dickinson Has Inspired Him To Direct

Josh O’Connor experienced the splendor of Cannes in 2023, when he was there with Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. This year, he’s back with two movies in contention for the Palme d’Or: Kelly Reichardt’s art heist picture The Mastermind and Oliver Hermanus’ The History of Sound, in which O’Connor stars with Paul Mescal.

While en route to the New York set of the untitled Steven Spielberg/Amblin/Universal film where he’s been cast alongside Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, Eve Hewson and Emily Blunt, O’Connor said of Spielberg, “He’s great. He is the dream, the best in the world,” but he admits being on set makes him miss home and tending to his fig trees and vegetables.

DEADLINE: What are you able to say about the Spielberg movie?

JOSH O’CONNOR: I’ll tell you what I’ll say. It’s like old-school Spielberg. I think people will be excited.

DEADLINE: When you say old-school Spielberg, what does that mean?

O’CONNOR: Close Encounters, E.T.; that world.

DEADLINE: And do you play an American?

O’CONNOR: I guess I’m in my American period at the moment.

DEADLINE: Which brings us neatly to Reichardt’s The Mastermind.

O’CONNOR: It’s the 1970s. The Vietnam War was going on. Kelly’s really one of my favorite filmmakers in the world. Truly. There’s a handful of directors that I have dreamt of working with, and Kelly’s one of them. So, I’ve had the best time working with her. It’s in the traditional Kelly fashion. It’s looking at the world through the people that fall between the cracks and not necessarily the people you’d expect. Often, she’s looking at artists and stuff like that, and it’s got that vibe. It’s almost like she’s looking at the Vietnam War, but averting her eyes.

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DEADLINE: How so?

O’CONNOR: It’s in the background, really. It’s about this guy James Mooney who’s desperately trying to support his family and make a name for himself. He’s sort of a failed artist. He works as a carpenter.

DEADLINE: Reichardt has spoken in the past about looking at characters located in the perimeters of society. Is James in that category, do you think?

O’CONNOR: I guess in my head, when I hear “perimeters of society,” I would normally pick someone ostracized in some way or left behind. And in many ways, this character isn’t that. He’s middle-class, he’s from a perfectly good family, but he’s in the outside of society insofar as he lives quite a plain life, an unfulfilled life. That’s what’s pulling him to make a name for himself. It’s almost more tragic in that he just feels forgotten. He just feels like a regular Joe. And I guess Kelly’s asking, “What’s worse than being regular Joe?” For someone who has a big ego, that’s not great.

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DEADLINE: Does he have a family to raise?

O’CONNOR: He’s got two kids, two boys and a wife. Alana Haim plays my wife in it.

DEADLINE: Where does Reichardt set the story?

O’CONNOR: Outside of Boston, in the Cambridge area, but we shot in Cincinnati, Ohio, which is architecturally very interesting for the period we’re in, the ’70s. Again, it’s that middletown, quiet suburbia.

DEADLINE: He sounds like the forgotten white man who in contemporary terms might have voted for Donald Trump.

O’CONNOR: If you’re looking at the moment in time, that’s the relevance. An interesting angle on it, is that shooting somewhere like Ohio as the election was just going on was a very interesting place to be, and that’s where J.D. Vance is from. 

I think, politically, that period in the ’70s for America and the Vietnam War was really interesting. Kelly is diverting her eyes to the politics always in every film. It’s there in the background and she is talking about it, but she isn’t. It’s like, she’s never crude about it. It’s not obvious like in so many scripts I read, and in many movies, and I understand why. They are movies that are built to, “How can we get these things awards?” [With Kelly] a tear would be welling up in a scene and she’d be like, “Cut! What are you doing? We don’t cry in these movies.” She’s the antithesis of that. She wants to keep it real. She doesn’t want to get too earnest about things. There’s a lightness to it. There’s comedy, but there’s depth.

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DEADLINE: Yeah, I think Reichardt would rather be teaching film class at Bard College than chasing awards, right?

O’CONNOR: That’s not the primary purpose. She’s not seeking that.

DEADLINE: So is James the leader of the art thieves? I see John Magaro, a Reichardt regular, is also in it. Is he in the gang of thieves?

O’CONNOR: The majority of the film is my character on the run. We come across John Magaro, who is an old friend of mine from art school, and there are all sorts of characters I come into play with. Todd Haynes had this great quote about Kelly, where he said, “The thing about a Kelly Reichardt movie, is it’s like a road movie that never quite hits the road.” They never quite get that joy.

DEADLINE: And what kind of artwork does he steal? Is it contemporary? Are they Old Masters…?

O’CONNOR: It’s someone who is the perfect answer for this, because it’s someone who is not headline-grabbing at all. It’s someone worth a bit of money, but not quite worth what they should be worth. It’s Arthur Dove [a pioneer of American abstraction]. His artwork is kind of surreal, but it’s also, well, in my opinion, not that attractive. It’s funny because he is brilliant and he would sell for money, but it’s not stealing a Picasso. Even in his grand thievery it’s sort of underwhelming.

DEADLINE: Reichardt’s father was a crime scene investigator—do you think his profession influenced the film in some way?

O’CONNOR: I remember thinking, “Oh, that makes sense to me,” just for someone who is led by story to have grown up in that environment. But once we got to work it wasn’t talked about an awful lot. So, I think it’s in the background. These aren’t stories that come from her father or anything like that, but I imagine it must’ve had an influence on her.

DEADLINE: Some have commented, “This doesn’t sound like a Kelly Reichardt movie.” 

O’CONNOR: I would say as a Kelly fan, I watched this movie, and you can see Kelly Reichardt in it. You can see all of the humor. You can see the messaging that’s not overt or crude. I think people won’t be disappointed.

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DEADLINE: Reichardt once commented that what actors do “remains very mysterious to me. I try and stay out of their way. We’re together in search of a character.”

O’CONNOR: That really resonates with me. I think that’s so true. Although, just to counter it a little bit, I would say, the thing is that first of all, she loves that mystery. She loves that she doesn’t understand what we do, but I think she understands more than she makes out. I think actually she has a very clear idea of who the characters are. But, like any brilliant director, and I’ve been fortunate enough to witness this, there’s this real gift you can have as a director where you say you have an idea. And rather than go to the actor and say, “This is my idea, OK? Do it.” You just find a way of allowing the actor to discover the same idea you always had in the first place, because we then feel like we have an ownership over it. And that’s not to downplay what actors do in any way. She’s worked with some of the greats, like Michelle [Williams]. It’s just that I think Kelly undervalues her talent and she does have those ideas. What you’re doing is fitting into a Kelly Reichardt vision, and it’s a negotiation, of course, but she is somehow imprinting these ideas in us. That’s my belief anyway.

DEADLINE: How does she infuse her films with the disparate stripes of her life: teaching, what she views in art galleries, her longtime friendship with Todd Haynes?

O’CONNOR: First of all, she’s an art lover. She loves film so very much. She’s one of those filmmakers that has an encyclopedic knowledge of movies, particularly old movies. We’ve often forgotten with Kelly, she does teach at Bard. She’s a great teacher. Again, that’s a similar thing to being a great director. She worked with Todd Haynes at the start. She’s worked in film for years in different roles and capacities. She went to art school, she’s got all that history there, and it just comes through in all of her movies. It’s just Kelly. It’s so obviously her.

DEADLINE: Did she screen any old movies for you?

O’CONNOR: She sent me some documentary footage from the ’70s. I can’t remember the name of it, but that was more just to get this idea of how families are together. There’s a couple of scenes [in The Mastermind] where it’s Bill Camp, Hope Davis, me, Alana, and we all sat around the table.

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DEADLINE: Where is Vietnam in the movie?

O’CONNOR: It’s kind of an undercurrent of the movie. We don’t go to Vietnam. We don’t ever really talk about it. There might be a brief moment over the dinner table where Bill Camp comments on it. And the reason it’s an undercurrent is like, here is a man of age who isn’t at war.

DEADLINE: You’re also in The History of Sound, which is based on a 2018 short story by Ben Shattuck. You play David and Paul Mescal is Lionel, and they meet in a Cambridge, Massachusetts bar in 1916 and bond over regional folk songs. 

O’CONNOR: Then they go on this journey. The film follows Lionel who has this synesthesia, where he can see color and see and feel emotions when he listens to music. He also has an incredible singing voice. And David is like an archivist and has a fascination with collecting the old folk songs of America. And then they go on this very beautiful journey together. And I go missing for a long time.

DEADLINE: David plays the piano. Can you play it?

O’CONNOR: I couldn’t play the piano until I did this movie. I still can’t, but I can play it better than I could. I took a few lessons and I just learned in the end. I’d like to think the truth is I didn’t have an awfully long time to prep for this movie, and I jumped in between projects. He’s a very beautiful character that is so meaningful to me and to the movie, of course, but I didn’t have an awful lot of time, so I just learned those songs on piano.

DEADLINE: The original short story is about time and memory and the little things that matter over time.

O’CONNOR: I think it’s that thing of what the film does incredibly well is it plays into that feeling of nostalgia and regret and loss. I came in and they shot all of my stuff, which is mostly this traveling through America which is very beautiful. So that was really just lovely. We did that for a couple of weeks, then I left. Then I was on Challengers, and then I was shooting Knives Out [Wake Up Dead Man]. So it was all kind of busy and I felt like that movie was over. But of course they had all of the rest of the movie to shoot. And when I saw it, seeing what they’d done, what they created without me was just … I was so proud of them. It was such a nice feeling. But what’s so beautiful about it is this feeling of song and of music. When you listen to a piece of music and it transports you to a certain place or a time, and if you close your eyes, you can feel like you are actually there.

DEADLINE: Shattuck writes about the songs they collect being filled with stories of people’s lives. Did you feel that connection to community?

O’CONNOR: David is a connector, he pulls people together, but his ultimate aim is to collect these songs. Whereas Lionel, Paul’s character, starts to see that what they’re getting isn’t just these songs. As you said, it’s community.

DEADLINE: Did you and Paul Mescal go on any pub crawls in New England? And then, of course, you worked on Rian Johnson’s latest Knives Out with James Bond [Daniel Craig] and Andrew Scott in actual England.

O’CONNOR: I wish we did. I am so boring nowadays. I’m in bed by nine o’clock. I don’t know what’s happened to me. But no, I am afraid I didn’t. But we had a great time. And on Knives Out, James Bond was in it, Andrew Scott, some of my closest friends. It was lovely. Even though I’m again playing an American, we shot it in London. So, it was the first time I could be home for ages.

DEADLINE: Images of you in clerical garb in the Knives Out movie reminded me of Mr. Elton, the village vicar you played in the Jane Austen film Emma.

O’CONNOR: I said to Rian Johnson, “My favorite role I think I’ve ever played was Mr. Elton.” I remember when I saw that movie, thinking, there’s all these brilliant actors, Johnny Flynn, Anya [Taylor-Joy], Mia Goth, Callum Turner, all these guys are doing one movie and then me and Tanya Reynolds are doing, I don’t know what we’re doing, but it’s not the same movie. But I had the time of my life. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to go quite so over the top on this movie.

DEADLINE: Having starred in Guadagnino’s Challengers, are you still involved in his screen version of Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s novel Separate Rooms?

O’CONNOR: Unfortunately not. Luca’s working all the time. He’s such a busy bee and rightly so. We’re constantly talking. He may well do it, but unfortunately it won’t be with me.

DEADLINE: Do you know what you are doing next?

O’CONNOR: I’m shooting this summer in Europe with an American director, more of which I can’t say. But then I am going to go and do some other stuff for a little bit. I love my ceramics, I love gardening. My poor garden is suffering when I go away. And I’m definitely looking forward to some time to just try some other things and maybe get back on stage. It’s been too long. There are conversations around various places. Maybe not exclusively in London as well.

DEADLINE: Is the idea to work with diverse directors who aren’t here in the UK? Of course, UK actors have always flown the coop and returned home later.

O’CONNOR: I think there’s an element of that. Like Alice Rohrwacher’s who for me is … the filmmakers I always loved were Pasolini, Rossellini, Bellocchio, to me she’s that. Luca’s a hero of mine. But one of my first films, with Francis Lee, was God’s Own Country in the UK. I think he’s one of our greats. And he’s extremely thoughtful. And because of that, his films come when they come. You have to wait. But I’ll always work with him again. I think we’ve also suffered a little bit in the British film industry with arts funding being cut. And I think that’s been difficult for places like the BFI for supporting young filmmakers. I don’t think that’s the reason people are doing more films in America. I think that’s just sometimes what happens. But I’m always on the lookout to be at home.

DEADLINE: How did Spielberg come-a-calling?

O’CONNOR: About this time last year, I was in New York and on the night of the Met Gala, I got a text from my agent saying, “Can you meet Steven Spielberg tomorrow for coffee?” And I was like, “Yes!” And I went to his office, Amblin. He told me he didn’t have a script, but he told me the story of the movie and he said, “Would you like to do it?” And I sort of feigned, “Let me think about it.” But obviously…

DEADLINE: Good joke.

O’CONNOR: It was kind of straightforward. He’s just the most special person. He seems to have the most incredible amount of energy I’ve ever witnessed. He comes up to you, he whispers in your ear like an excited child about an idea, a thought, and it’s truly inspiring.

DEADLINE: Who are the cast members you work with the most in the Spielberg?

O’CONNOR: Emily Blunt and myself are kind of following that track.

DEADLINE: Are the pair of you related in some way?

O’CONNOR: In some way.

DEADLINE: Husband and wife? Siblings…? 

O’CONNOR: I’ve got to dash, I’ve got to go to makeup.

DEADLINE: Oh, you’re not an alien, are you?

O’CONNOR: Maybe. [laughing] I wouldn’t need any makeup for that!

DEADLINE: You co-wrote the film Bonus Track. Are there further thoughts about screenplays and perhaps directing, because years ago you told me you’d like to direct?

O’CONNOR: Hopefully. Maybe something down the line. I noticed that Harris Dickinson’s got his movie [Urchin] at Cannes, which I’m delighted about. I think he’s really inspired me actually go and maybe try it. You know what it’s like, it gets busy, but it is definitely a dream of mine.