Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal had been wanting to make “The History of Sound” (September 12, Mubi) for five years. But the two actors were both in such demand that it kept being pushed back until they finally became available at the same time.
Now, O’Connor finds himself in the odd position of having to promote four movies coming out this fall. Is he tired? “Yeah, I am,” he said on Zoom just after the Telluride Film Festival. “I’ve maxed out a little bit.”
The two actors met during the pandemic, on Zoom, after O’Connor watched “Normal People” and like many of us, believed he was discovering an exciting young talent. He emailed his American agent: “You have to see this kid. He’s amazing.” His agent had already signed him. It turns out Mescal had been watching O’Connor, as well. The two got on famously, and have been chums ever since. (Check out their hilarious recent appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”)
“The History of Sound” director Oliver Hermanus went ahead with essentially the first draft of the script about two folk music collectors in love, Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor) who travel the South trawling for cool songs to record for posterity. “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, miraculous. Paul and I were constantly unavailable, and we both refused to make it with anyone else. So we would get a date in, and then we kick it down the road, and then someone else would get another job. So we kick it down the road. And in the end, there was this three week gap between me going off to do ‘Challengers’ press and ‘La Chimera’ press. And so we shot all my stuff first in three weeks, and then I left Paul and Oliver to do it. The script was so good; it felt like one of those projects where you could lead with instinct, in the knowledge that I was playing opposite Paul, who’s so gifted. It felt like a breeze.”
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 was able to attend because he had been shooting Max Walker-Silverman’s “Rebuilding” (Bleecker Street, November 7) nearby. The micro-budget indie (Sundance 2025) about a farm community recovering from wildfires had wangled a permit to shoot during the Actors Strike. “‘Rebuilding‘ was one of the most moving filmmaking experiences I’ve ever had,” said O’Connor. “There’s a hopefulness to it. It’s a small crew, and we were pitched up in the middle of nowhere in a town called Alamosa in Colorado. I went out there to work on a ranch for a little bit before we started.”
“The History of Sound,” while it involves a romance, is not overtly sexy. The two men fall in love for a time, but it’s an intellectual relationship, a shared love of music. Mescal’s Lionel is more comfortable with his sexuality than O’Connor’s David. “At one point David says, ‘Do you worry about this?’” said O’Connor. “It’s’s obviously something he’s considered. We later find out that he’s married. He’s contending with his sexuality at times. David feels shame for a number of reasons. I was drawn to the story because I found the immediate intellectual attraction exciting and refreshing. I also loved the idea of exploring synesthesia and music being associated to memory, but mostly my attraction to that character and to this story was to do with grief, in all its forms.”
O’Connor had lost someone he cared deeply about the year before. “The last few years, ‘La Chimera,’ a lot of the work I’ve been doing, has been trying to compute that. What ‘History of Sound’ grabbed for me was the idea of our memories of someone. Paul and I would often talk about the scenes we were doing. Were these factual scenes, or are these, through Lionel’s eyes, his memories of that summer? And are they therefore influenced by what he knows now? That plays into the moments of sadness that David feels, or the moment of joy and fun and playfulness that they have.”
In both “The History of Sound” and “The Mastermind” (October 17, Mubi) O’Connor, who grew up in the West of England, had to maneuver his mouth around an American accent, “with great difficulty,” 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’s drawn out, whereas the American accent is a relaxed R, and so it’s difficult for me to move my mouth in the way that it’s supposed to 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 of 2024, O’Connor went off and did the “Challengers” and “La Chimera” press tour, and then joined Rian Johnson’s ensemble for “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” followed by Massachusetts heist caper “The Mastermind” at the end of the year.
Clearly, O’Connor is a Kelly Reichardt fan. “She makes the movies I want to watch,” he said. “I find them so funny. And there’s often tragedy, and there’s often mundane elements and sometimes, even, like in our movie, when I’m putting the pictures up in that barn, that shot is completely ridiculous. I like sitting with something. I don’t like to be rushed when I watch things. And Kelly does that so beautifully. To do that kind of a role is bliss to me.”
“The Mastermind” was filmed on 35mm in long takes and immersed O’Connor, who was born in 1990, into the ’70s. His character, Mooney, wears checkered shirts and brown corduroy and drives a gold ’64 Chevy Nova. “Those cars are chaotic,” he said. “They’re so hard to drive, they’re beautiful machines. But the wheel, it takes about three full turns to take a slight right turn. Kelly and I spent a long time watching documentaries and sharing photographs and artwork from the period.”
Mooney is the father of young boys dealing (poorly) with male responsibility, as he’s not fulfilling his role as breadwinner nor is he going off to war. “There’s this post-60s political, problematic idea about our responsibility to peace and the Vietnam War,” said O’Connor. “He’s too old to be called up. He’s unemployed. He’s an artist. And men who are artists, who are not working, there’s shame to that. He’s got a huge ego and low self esteem. That period did something to someone like Mooney.”
Reichardt and O’Connor took a long time to figure out which artworks Mooney was going to steal. “Arthur Dove is a great artist, but at the time, his work wasn’t worth anything,” said O’Connor. “You’re not going to get rich quick from some Arthur Doves, particularly at that time. They’re of a particular taste. Mooney wouldn’t steal a Picasso, because that’s mainstream, he’s full of ego. Yes, the grand heist fulfills the ego. But also, ‘if I’m going to steal art, I want people to know that I’m an art lover, I know art.’ So Arthur Dove fulfills that. I didn’t steal any old artist. I stole the up-and-coming artist that the regular Joe doesn’t know about. So it’s a point of pride for him. How it goes so wrong? He’s deluded. He has no idea how much he screwed up. He’s completely in denial throughout.”
As if there wasn’t enough going on, O’Connor plays a priest in “Wake Up Dead Man” (November 26, Netflix), the third installment of Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” series, alongside Daniel Craig, Kerry Washington, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, and Andrew Scott. “It’s an amazing stacked up cast,” he said, “and I was just a part of it.”
Next up: The cast for the untitled Steven Spielberg science-fiction movie (Universal, June 12, 2026) written by David Koepp includes Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Emily Blunt and Colman Domingo, as well as O’Connor. “It’s Spielberg at his best,” said O’Connor. “There couldn’t be a more Spielberg movie. On my first day on set with him, I stood in a nondescript place, and there was rain, drips coming off the ceiling of this place, and a big beam of light from a car headlight. And some smoke. I thought, ‘This is so Spielberg.’ I had a brilliant experience. He is everything that you dream him to be.”
Joel Coen’s second solo outing “Jack of Spades” is halfway through shooting in Scotland with Lesley Manville, Damian Lewis, and Frances McDormand. “The energy on set is focused,” said O’Connor. “The experience of being directed by him might be one of the greatest ones I’ve had.”
There is a world where O’Connor would run away and go missing, get back to his garden in the West of England, make pots, and not do any acting for a long time. But that is an alternate universe. “I started in the theater, with a good number of years of auditioning and auditioning and getting turned down and turned down, being at the Royal Shakespeare Company, or in the Donmar and balancing that with working in pubs and restaurants,” said O’Connor. “What that does to you is, whenever a job finishes, you genuinely think this could be the last, and if you have imposter syndrome, like I do, and like most actors do, you’re going, this next one will be the one where they go ‘Ah, we were wrong. He’s rubbish.’ So, you’ve always got that needling away in the back of your mind, which makes it difficult.”
He admits he may have overextended himself in one sense: “there’s an element of mystery, which maybe we’ve lost, and that idea of an event movie coming out feels like a distant thing,” he said. He is going back to theater in Clifford Odets’ “Golden Boy” on the West End. “You won’t be seeing four films come out at the same time for a little while. That’s all I say.”
