Latest news with #JoshOConnor
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Crown 's Josh O'Connor Dating Saltburn 's Alison Oliver
Originally appeared on E! Online Josh O'Connor and Alison Oliver are a game, set, perfect match. The Crown alum and Saltburn actress confirmed their romance on May 29, when they stepped out for a PDA-packed stroll in London together. In photos of their casual outing, obtained by deuxmoi, Josh rocked an electric blue "Upper TWP History" baseball cap, navy blue trousers and a coordinating navy-and-green striped sweater while he strolled down the street beside Alison, who held onto his hand while wearing a matching sweatsuit and white sneakers. At one point, the Challengers actor wrapped his arm around the Conversations With Friends star's shoulder and planted a passionate kiss on her lips before the couple continued their walk down the sidewalk, holding hands. And while this may be the first time Josh, 35, and Alison, 27, have publicly showed affection for each other, it's not the first time the pair have stepped out together. Earlier this month, the duo linked up at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival premiere of Josh's new film The Mastermind, where they posed with the actor's parents Emily O'Connor and John O'Connor on the red carpet. More from E! Online See First Photo of Todd Chrisley Out in Public After Prison Release Julie Chrisley Looks Unrecognizable in First Photo After Prison Release How Julie Chrisley Feels About Ditching Her Blonde Hair After Prison And during a second Cannes outing, the pair appeared at a cocktail event together alongside friends Jeremy O'Harris, Este Haim, Danielle Haim and his Mastermind costar Alana Haim. In a video shared to TikTok May 24 from the occasion, Josh sat at a table, with Alison hovering over his shoulder. On his other side, the Haim bandmates mouthed along to lyrics that said, "I'm gonna be hungover," while the whole group—all dressed in formal attire—swayed back and forth holding onto glasses of white wine. And while neither Josh or Alison—who previously dated Normal People actor Éanna Hardwicke—have addressed their budding love story, Josh has fessed up to having past romantic feelings for FKA Twigs when they attended high school together in the U.K. 'I really shouldn't be saying this, but it's hilarious. I was in a band called Orange Output basically to try and get Twigs to go out with me,' he told GQ in 2023. 'I was the lead singer, and one of the lyrics I wrote was 'I'm addicted to crack, motherf--ker.' The closest thing I'd had to crack was Coco Pops.' But Josh didn't get a response from the musician at the time. As he quipped, 'I don't think she knows who I am.' For more of the most buzz-worthy celebrity couples, keep Baldwin & Kristin Davis Meagan Good & Joseph Gordon-Levitt For the latest breaking news updates, click here to download the E! News App
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stars, shockers, psychos and evangelists: Rupert Goold's mighty end to his high-wire Almeida tenure
Rupert Goold, the outgoing artistic director of the Almeida theatre in London, has just announced his final programme, which he hopes captures the 'spirit and values' of his past 12 years at its helm. Does it? Comprising 10 productions and four world premieres, it does contain all the signature-marks of Goold's tenure: a smattering of star names (including Josh O'Connor and Romala Garai, the former the American classic, Golden Boy, the latter in a version of A Doll's House by Anya Reiss); a big-ambition project with Jack Holden's adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker prize winning novel, The Line of Beauty, about 1980s gay life (how do you turn Hollinghurst's glorious prose into glorious theatre? We'll see this autumn, I suppose); and a revival of the musical thriller American Psycho, based on Bret Easton Ellis's book, which featured in Goold's first programme at the Almeida in 2013, and brings a nice circularity to this last one. A play about masculine psychopathy, it is in the mould of previous musicals that combined hard-edged subject matter with song, from Spring Awakening, featuring teen depression, rape and suicide, to the rise and fall of a TV evangelist, Tammy Faye (both of which Goold directed). There is also another production by Rebecca Frecknall – a revival of Sarah Kane's searing play, Cleansed. Frecknall, a star director whom Goold has long championed, is joining Goold at the Old Vic as associate director when he takes over as its artistic director, so this does not mark the end of their impressive collaboration. Few could dispute that Goold has made this little but mighty theatre, nestling in the heart of leafy north London, all the mightier. Openings there have become unmissable events and many have transferred to the West End, including American Psycho (then to Broadway, in fact). For good or bad, Goold is also one of the leading industry figures to have brought screen talent closer to the stage. In fairness, most of power celebrity castings have been well judged, alongside causing a stir – from Saoirse Ronan's Lady Macbeth to Daisy Edgar-Jones as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Paul Mescal as Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as musical collaborations with Elton John and Jake Shears for Tammy Faye. But what I see as Goold's greatest accomplishment is his collaborations with the most exciting writers and directors of our time. It is this that has made this programming so formidable. He has a long track record with Robert Icke, each play ever more sensational, from his monumental Oresteia to The Doctor, which transferred to the West End, and Hamlet starring Andrew Scott. There have been several plays by Mike Bartlett (the biggest highlight was King Charles III), as well as the supremely talented Omar Elerian and Beth Steel. These are rich associations, alongside those with Frecknall. I look forward to Alice Birch's Romans: A Novel, opening in September. Like Goold, Birch has shuttled between TV and stage work, having recently written television versions of Sally Rooney's Normal People and Conversations With Friends. She will make her Almeida debut with this examination of masculinity across two centuries. Some of my personal highlights have been the more high-wire moments in Goold's tenure: Elerian's exquisite revival of Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs, a production of Jeremy O Harris's Daddy: A Melodrama, featuring a giant swimming pool across the span off the stage. And, of course, The Years, which is one of the best plays I have seen in the past five years – and in which Garai also featured. So several circularities – and the promise of a very strong swansong indeed.
Vogue
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Josh O'Connor Was a Snazzy Standout at the Cannes Film Festival
At the annual Cannes Film Festival, traditional evening attire and classic tuxedo dressing always prevails—so much so that the 2025 festival dress code was stricter than ever. (This year, that meant no naked dressing or over-the-top voluminous gowns.) Even so, that didn't mean that top Hollywood stars didn't have fun with their outfits. Specifically, the men of Cannes embraced whimsical dressing—be it Alexander Skarsgard in thigh-high boots, or Jeremy Strong with his rainbow assortment of pastels. The Mastermind star Josh O'Connor, meanwhile, was another best dressed celebrity: He totally stood out with his individualistic approach to suiting up. Working with stylist Harry Lambert (who was also behind Skarsgard's winning Cannes looks), O'Connor took a more eccentric approach to tailoring—with much of his festival wardrobe being custom Prada. 'Me and Josh looked through the last Prada show and exchanged some images of runway looks that we loved, and we started building out a moodboard with references and ideas,' says Lambert. 'There was quite a bit of mix-and-matching of pieces in the last show, which we loved. We wanted to do mix-and-matched tailoring for Cannes.' It started when the star first touched down in the south of France: O'Connor landed in a green and cream western-style Prada shirt, paired with a cool oversized bowling bag. 'We looked at a knitwear from the runway, and there was this cream and green jumper with western detailing. We asked Prada to turn it into a shirt for us,' says Lambert.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The History of Sound' Review: Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor Bring Aching Poignancy to Restrained but Heartfelt Queer Love Story
Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor offer more proof that they are among the best contemporary actors we have in The History of Sound, a resonant account of a tender but too-fleeting gay love affair interrupted by World War I. Adapted by Ben Shattuck from his jewel-like short story of the same name, the film's romance and heartache are intensified by the intimate experience the two men share of traveling the backwoods of Maine in 1919, collecting traditional folk tunes and ballads from rural people, essentially the equivalent in music of an oral history. South African director Oliver Hermanus had a breakthrough in 2019 with Moffie, a searing indictment of institutionalized homophobia in the Apartheid-era military. He switched gears from the visceral physical and psychological violence of that film to a more subdued approach three years later with Living, a delicate adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's 1952 classic Ikiru, scripted by Kazuo Ishiguro and led by Bill Nighy as a London bureaucrat diagnosed with terminal cancer, trying to make his remaining days meaningful. More from The Hollywood Reporter Paul Mescal Seduces Cannes With Gay Romance 'The History of Sound' 'Fuori' Review: A Writer's Wild Life Gets Tame Treatment in a Serviceable Italian Biopic Cannes: Neon Picks Up Wagner Moura's 'The Secret Agent' Political Thriller A similar restraint governs Hermanus' new film, which yields its rewards in an unhurried fashion but finds quiet power in understatement, its passion and yearning revealed in the eyes of its superb lead actors. The director is working very much in a classical vein, collaborating with cinematographer Alexander Dynan to view the drama through a painterly lens, with an elegant sense of composition and spatial dynamics and images that look frequently like they could have been ripped right out of an Andrew Wyeth painting. The movie for many will be challengingly paced, as indicated by some walkouts during its first Cannes press screening. Comparisons with Brokeback Mountain seem inevitable, and Ang Lee's beloved 2005 romantic tragedy remains in a class of its own. But if you tap into The History of Sound's soulful undercurrents, the soaring spiritual dimensions of the music — in songs more often about people than Divinity — and the depth of feeling in Mescal and O'Connor's performances, this is a film of lingering melancholic beauty. The power of the music alone makes it one of the most unabashedly romantic LGBTQ films in recent memory. Mescal plays Lionel, a Kentucky farm boy who shares in opening voiceover narration that he can 'see' music. He can identify the exact note of his mother's morning cough, a dog's bark or a frog's croak, and even tell the shape, color and taste of music. Impressed with his vocal skills, a schoolteacher helps him land a scholarship to the New England Conservatory in Boston. Lionel is at a local bar there with friends one night when he recognizes a folk song his father (Raphael Sbarge) used to sing, coming from the piano. He introduces himself to the pianist, David (O'Connor), asking how someone in Boston comes to know an obscure Kentucky tune. David says traveling and collecting songs in the summers is his hobby. Born in Newport and sent to London to live with an uncle after losing his parents, David is a more sophisticated type than Lionel, but they hit it off. Lionel names several songs from his background before he lands on one David has never heard. But when he sings 'Silver Dagger,' a gorgeous traditional in which a mother warns her daughter of the wickedness of men, David is enchanted. From that first encounter, Shattuck's screenplay establishes their shared passion for folk songs and story ballads, a form that might be a poetic fit for the romance that develops between them. David takes the lead at first, not asking but telling Lionel to walk him home after they shut down the bar and then inviting him up for a glass of water. O'Connor makes David witty, playful and not at all shy, spitting out a mouthful of water that the bewitched Lionel catches on his tongue, even before mutual desire has been acknowledged. One of the loveliest things about this film compared to most queer period pieces is the absence of uncertainty and, mostly, shame. It's not about the repression of the time or the fear of exposure, even if conventional expectations do weigh on one of the men later in the story. It's about an instantaneous and enduring connection, anchored as much in music as in sexual attraction or romantic love. When David is drafted in 1917 to fight in World War I, Lionel, excluded from the draft because of poor eyesight, is devastated, telling him: 'Write. Send chocolate. Don't die.' With classes at the conservatory shut down because of the war, Lionel returns to Kentucky, his unhappiness quickly detected by his hard-bitten mother (Molly Price). In a dryly amusing barb, she tells him he should never have gone to Boston in the first place, then he wouldn't have minded coming back. He hears nothing from David until two years later when a letter arrives. David has taken a position in the music department of a regional Maine college, where senior faculty have asked him to spend the winter traveling off the beaten path through the state to record the songs of ordinary people. 'How about a long walk in the winter?' he writes. It's not so much a question as a summons, but to Lionel it's an invitation engraved in gold. Those months they spend going from place to place on foot are observed with a kind of quiet rapture. Lionel learns to operate the phonograph, recording the songs on wax cylinders, while Paul takes down the lyrics and any information about the song's origins. This yields some lovely encounters. One woman eyes the machine warily as if it's a surgical instrument, asking 'Will I feel something?' before launching into a beautiful traditional song, with her young daughters providing the sweetest harmonies. 'My grandfather once said that happiness is not a story, so there wasn't much to say about those first weeks,' notes Lionel in voiceover. The factors that might intrude on any queer love affair in the early 20th century all but evaporate under the cover of wilderness, and even the harsh conditions of a Maine winter seem inconsequential when the two men are entwined in the tent, asleep. One significant embellishment to Shattuck's short story is a detour to Malaga Island, where the state governor is making plans to evict an interracial community of former slaves and poor immigrants. A Black woman who goes by Thankful Mary Swain (Briana Middleton) lends her heavenly voice to 'Here in the Vineyard,' a song of praise so transporting that Lionel is moved to join in. Heading back to the mainland while knowing the violent uprooting of the island people that's to come, the lovers have their first disagreement, with Lionel saying they should have stayed and David insisting there was nothing they could have done. That difference of opinion alters something between them. David asks, 'Do you ever worry about this? What we're doing?' Lionel replies simply, 'No, I don't worry.' The reliably wonderful O'Connor is especially good in these scenes as David begins the detachment process by suggesting Lionel go to Boston and teach or travel to Europe and make a living as a singer. He quickly nixes the idea of Lionel coming to work with him at the Maine college, claiming it's too provincial to interest him. The fact that Lionel would follow him there for love alone signals a switch in their relationship, where worldly David has become the cautious one and Lionel the one who knows his mind and stays firm. Their separation at Augusta station is wrenching, with David only showing his sorrow when he's alone. The latter sections of the movie meander at times as the narrative stretches beyond Shattuck's story — Lionel joins a prestigious choir in Rome and has a half-hearted fling with a young Venetian (Alessandro Bedetti), whom he dumps for an offer in Oxford, where well-heeled bohemian Clarissa (Emma Canning) makes the mistake of thinking their relationship will lead to marriage. What keeps the movie transfixing is Lionel's poignant recollections of moments with David, fragments of conversation that play in his mind. In what might be his best performance since Aftersun, Mescal's eyes reveal the accumulation of sorrow, the creeping realization that he will never again be as happy as he was those weeks in Maine. The ending is somewhat protracted, but it's worth the wait to see national treasure Chris Cooper turn up as Lionel in 1980, by that time a respected ethno-musicologist. A televised interview about his newly published history of folk music catches the attention of someone who sends him a gift that's been gathering dust in her attic. The scene that follows, in which the past comes flooding back to Lionel as he sits at the piano, has a depth of feeling that's almost overwhelming. Hermanus again shows highly polished craftsmanship, adding the subtlest hint of sepia tones to evoke the period in the early sections, but never to the point where the characters compete with the settings. His direction of the actors is exemplary, even with characters seen only briefly, like Lionel's parents or the humble backwoods folks who share their songs. Woven into an affecting, predominantly string score by Oliver Coates, the music interludes are without exception sublime, including those sung tunefully but with more gusto than vocal skill by O'Connor and those invested with full-throated feeling by Mescal. They range from expressions of sorrow or love, murder ballads or even something as delightfully morbid as 'The Unquiet Grave,' in which a dead woman laments her true love's constant presence at her headstone, disturbing her rest. The echo of that song in the ballad of David and Lionel is both sweet and shattering. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Mastermind' Review: Josh O'Connor Lands on Kelly Reichardt's Precise Wavelength in an Understated, Funny-Sad Heist Movie Like No Other
Leave it to Kelly Reichardt to make a '70s movie that looks and feels like a lost '70s movie, from its scruffy visual aesthetic to its muted colors, its patient character observation and unhurried pacing to its unstinting investment in an underdog protagonist whose careful planning results in a coup that soon goes south. Josh O'Connor's rumpled appeal makes him an ideal fit for the title role in The Mastermind, a minor-key heist caper that spends as much or more time on the aftermath of the crime, when it morphs gracefully into another of the director's singular character studies of struggling Americans. The film is set in Massachusetts circa 1970, two decades before the infamous art theft at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, whose walls still conserve the empty spaces where stolen paintings by artists including Vermeer, Rembrandt, Manet and Degas once hung. It seems like quintessential Reichardt that James Blaine Mooney (O'Connor) is not going after the Old Masters or anything even close in value. Instead, he targets four paintings by American modernist Arthur Dove, one of the country's pioneering abstract painters — influential but back then not in high demand. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Amrum' Review: Diane Kruger in Fatih Akin's Sentimental Drama Set During the Last Days of Nazi Germany Cannes Gives Warm Welcome to Dardennes and 'Young Mother's Home' 'Resurrection' Review: Director Bi Gan's Beguiling, Beautifully Realized Journey Through the Life, Death and Possible Rebirth of Cinema Reichardt takes her first solo writing credit on this feature, which nonetheless has echoes of two films penned with frequent screenwriting collaborator Jonathan Raymond. It has shades of the meticulous planning of the eco-activists who blow up a hydroelectric dam in Night Moves and continues the vein of subtle humor that made the microcosmic art world view in Showing Up so captivating. The opening sequence follows J.B. as he walks from room to room, studying both the art and the snoozing guard in a fictional museum in Framingham. (Stand-in for the exteriors is the I.M. Pei-designed Cleo Rogers Memorial Library with its massive Henry Moore bronze out front, memorably showcased in the beautiful Kogonada film, Columbus.) One half of a pair of young twins prattles on incessantly about some sci-fi arcana while the boy's bored-looking mother and his quieter brother tune him out. Only once J.B. has opened a display cabinet to pilfer a small artifact and they head for the exit does it become clear that the woman is his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and the kids are his sons, Carl and Tommy (Sterling and Jasper Thompson). Terri appears to be an accomplice while the boys serve as decoys, which initially calls to mind stories of families in petty crime cahoots like Hirokazu Kore-eda's masterpiece, Shoplifters. But that proves to be a bit of crafty misdirection. When James moves beyond small trial runs and prepares to lift the Dove paintings, Terri seems to want to know as little as possible. James puts together a team of three, Guy (Eli Gelb, one of the discoveries of Broadway hit Stereophonics), Larry (Cole Doman) and Ronnie Gibson (Javion Allen), assuring them they will be in and out in eight minutes. James explains that he can't be there while the heist is going down because his face is now too well known to museum staff. But when Larry bails as driver, J.B. has to fill that role, and although they do get the paintings out, things don't entirely go according to plan thanks to Ronnie, who pulls a gun on an art student and gets into a scuffle with a security guard at the exit. Several scenes later, after Ronnie has caused further trouble, J.B. gets a too-late lesson in the mocking words of a savvier thief (Matthew Maher): 'Never work with drug addicts, dealers or wild cards.' Once news of the daring daylight art heist breaks, J.B.'s father, Bill (Bill Camp), a local judge, also has thoughts that might have been more useful before the event: 'It seems inconceivable that these abstract paintings would be worth the trouble.' One of the great contemporary character actors, Camp dials up the pomposity as Judge Mooney muses about the dark market before conceding, 'These things are outside my realm of experience.' Bill's criticism of unemployed James for not making something of his carpentry skills like a small business owner with whom he was at school seem a significant factor in J.B's decision to try making money the easy way. Dishonestly. His mother, Sarah (Hope Davis, sublime), is more indulgent with him, though when he hits her up for a sizeable loan on top of money he already owes her, she insists on a scheduled repayment plan. While Reichardt never pushes for comedy, these fusty parental exchanges are often very funny, as are J.B.'s bad-parenting episodes with the boys. Period production and costume design (by Anthony Gasparro and Amy Roth, respectively) are instantly evocative of the era, while being careful never to distract with conspicuous kitsch. But some relics of the '70s inevitably get laughs — the crank-handle rear window that gives Guy trouble while he's rushing to load the paintings into the back of a stolen station wagon; the forgotten marketing gimmick of L'eggs Pantyhose, sold in plastic egg-shaped packaging, which J.B. provides to his crew to wear as masks. Reichardt finds infectious fascination in some of the more mundane elements of the crime, such as James applying his carpentry know-how to build a tailor-made storage crate for the paintings. That crate then yields physical comedy when he crawls up a ladder to hide it in a hayloft while a pig snorts away in the background, snarfling for food and paying J.B. no attention. Playing a character who might easily be an American cousin to his sad-sack grave robber in La Chimera, O'Connor deftly balances those comic moments with a slow build of melancholy and regret — 'I didn't really think it through,' he says morosely — as J.B.'s get-rich-quick scheme slips out of his reach. Haim, the singer who became a breakout screen star in Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza, has less to work with as Terri. But she says a lot with her eyes about the character's internal battle between forbearance and walking away to protect herself and the boys from James' wreckage. There seems genuine regret on both sides when James loses Terri as an ally. The economy of Haim's performance is very much in keeping with Reichardt's less-is-more policy with her actors, which applies to the incisive casting even of the smallest roles, with faces that look right at home in the era. There's an interlude both lovely and sad in which James is still at large despite his face being splashed across newspapers. O'Connor strikes poignant notes when J.B. fools himself into thinking he's safe while laying low at the farm of his old friend Fred (indispensable Reichardt regular John Magaro) and his wife Maude (Gaby Hoffmann), who is convinced James is using their old college art professor as his fence. Fred appears quite excited to have a wanted felon in their midst, Maude considerably less so, which hastens J.B.'s departure. Throughout the film, newspaper headlines and snippets of TV contextualize the story against the backdrop of anti-Vietnam demonstrations, colleges retaliating to student campus protests and aggressive policing, along with glimpses of Richard Nixon's crooked grin. While Reichardt is careful not to hammer this element too loudly, it's impossible to miss the parallels with today's political landscape. James' attempted flight to Canada hits a snag during one of those street protests, and the final shot of him, boxed into a small part of the frame, is crushing. Longtime DP collaborator Christopher Blauvelt, who also shot Meek's Cutoff, Night Moves, Certain Women, First Cow and Showing Up for Reichardt, remains a matchless fit for the director's naturalistic minimalism, ensuring that even rows of trees in blazing fall colors are never overly pretty. As she did with Night Moves, Reichardt has made a genre picture that peels away all the usual tropes to focus on character, on human failings and on the reality that even someone from a comfortable middle-class background can be worn down by struggle and reach for unwise solutions. The only major departure for Reichardt is the highly effective use of a score by jazz musician Rob Mazurek. The cool, but also nervy riffs of percussion, bass, brass and drums sound like the work of a beatnik dive bar ensemble winding down at the end of a long set, providing the perfect complement to a decelerated movie that runs on understatement. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV
