Josh O’Connor is one of those actors whose performances feel like a mountain climb. The higher he gets, the more guttural his portrayals become. He conveys a whole range of emotions, from tenderness to sensuality and disgust.
It started with his career-turning performance in The Crown where Emma Corrin’s haunting and en pointe interpretation of Princess Diana didn’t eclipse his subtle and toned-down take on Prince Charles. O’Connor’s performance garnered him deserved accolades and increased respect within critical circuits.
O’Connor has spread his wings even further with two powerful performances electrifying this year’s slightly boring, slightly calm movie scene: Arthur in La Chimera and Patrick Zweig in Challengers.
Technically, La Chimera was released last year, so it won’t be eligible for this year’s Best Actor race at the Academy Awards. But it’s a great predisposition for his award potential for multiple reasons. Through the lens of La Chimera’s female director Alice Rohrwacher, O’Connor appears on the verge of a seance, a man feverish with memories and despair, harboring a sensitivity for hidden artifacts more than he understands how to communicate with people. Rohrwacher has seen the tormented, shy introvert inside O’Connor and exploited him, bringing him full circle in front of our mesmerized eyes. As he rests his head on stone, cowers in tight spaces, and caresses the stolen heads of statues, O’Connor’s Arthur is a madman torn with fragile masculinity, a visible lightness both difficult and enjoyable to watch. Like the fragile artifacts he holds between his palms, Arthur is a ceramic piece on the verge of cracking.
In Challengers, Luca Guadagnino, one of modern cinema’s most baroque masters of sexual subtext, pushes the docile man further down the drain of O’Connor’s psyche, bringing out the coy, seductive, bitter monster in him. Patrick is a seductive pansexual beauty. Unlike Art, the poetic lover, always needing a dominant woman or a passionate man to coax his internalized emotions, Patrick is a stallion, too wild to tame but too bored to care about being tamed.
O’Connor has impressive post-production and pre-production projects ahead. He has recently worked with diverse and international directors with different visions and artistic perspectives. He also has a supporting role in the drama Lee, co-starring Kate Winslet, due in September 2024.
He has another Luca Guadagnino project, Camere separate, in development. Brazilian-Algerian director Karim Aïnouz is directing him alongside festival darling Kristen Stewart in Rosebushpruning. He is also starring in South African director Oliver Hermanus’s latest creation, The History of Sound. The news of O’Connor’s casting in the third Knives Out installment with Daniel Craig, Cailee Spaeny, Kerry Washington, and Glenn Close has rocked the internet and trended on Twitter. That’s a lucrative career like no other and in a very short time. The tricky question in this case would be: Could O’Connor’s impressive performance in Challengers garner him a Best Actor nod this year? Does his Patrick Zweig deserve award recognition? After Cannes premieres like The Apprentice and Bird, and big players like Gladiator II in the second half of the year, the Best Lead Actor race is yet to be defined. So far, most male performances seem to be on a subdued, lukewarm level of ‘okay’ acting. The actors have yet to shine and cast shadows on each other in this so-far dull season.
Unlike female performances—notably Zendaya’s stunning, broken (but outwardly all-collected) mess as Tashi in Challengers—that predict a tough, competitive season, male performers are more laid-back as we near mid-2024. Their competition is unlike the thrilling past seasons, when it has been nearly impossible to pinpoint a deserving one over the other.To answer the big question, I would like to know if his performance in Challengers will give him an award nod. But do I feel he deserves it? Absolutely. I prefer his turn in La Chimera, but that doesn’t detract from his wild, subtly seductive turn as Patrick Zweig. We may see O’Connor for award consideration sooner than we think if voters, critics, and Academy boards recognize the Challengers cast as young Hollywood shakers.
