For Jack O'Connell, sharing a screen with George Clooney and Julia Roberts in the drama Money Monster, directed by Jodie Foster and in cinemas from today, is just the latest – and biggest to date – step in a meteoric rise to fame.
The British actor first came to the attention of audiences at the age of 15, playing Pukey Nicholls in Shane Meadows's acclaimed indie hit This is England in 2006.
Since then, his status has grown rapidly. He starred alongside Michael Fassbender in the 2008 horror Eden Lake, took a leading role as James Cook in the edgy British-TV teen drama series Skins, and in 2014, made his international breakthrough as real-life war hero Louis Zamperini in the film Unbroken directed by Angelina Jolie.
Though his rise has been rapid, O’Connell says it was not entirely unexpected – at least not to him.
“Even when I was a kid in Derby feeling aspirational it was always my intention to put myself in this position,” he says.
“Now that I’m in it, I’m not about to disbelieve it. I knew if I made the right decisions and worked hard enough at it, I’d give myself a fighting chance – and it seems to have happened.
“But I’ve made British films with the likes of Tim Roth and Michael Fassbender, and they’re all Hollywood stars too, so it wasn’t really a sudden arrival – or it never felt like that anyway.”
While in many of his early roles O'Connell played slightly unhinged, hard-man characters, in Unbroken he delivered a more nuanced performance as Zamperini – a former US Olympian who survived for 47 days on a raft after his plane was shot down during the Second World War, before he was captured by the Japanese and held in a series of prisoner of war camps.
At first glance, O'Connell seems to be returning to type in Money Monster, playing Kyle Budwell, an angry TV viewer who takes celebrity financial adviser Lee Gates (Clooney) hostage, after losing his family's savings following bad advice from the TV tipster.
However, O’Connell says that there is a lot more to Budwell than your average two-dimensional movie psychopath.
“He has a girlfriend with a baby on the way, so whatever his actions are, I consider them justified,” he says.
“From a personal perspective, it does put me on screen again playing a potentially unhinged character, but it was nice to believe in his reasons – and the more the story pans out and the more we learn about Kyle, the more we learn that he’s gone to an extreme for a quite admirable purpose.
“It’s going out to a predominantly American audience, and most people in the US probably haven’t seen me in those roles to the degree that they might have in the UK.
“Plus, it put me on a set with Julia Roberts, George Clooney and Jodie Foster – that’s very hard to pass up.”
O’Connell is full of praise for his veteran A-list colleagues, particularly Foster.
“Jodie has handled all the very human qualities about the movie very well,” he says. “It’s unpredictable, it’s relevant and it’s easy to relate to all the characters on screen.
“There were times when she’d offer me direction by actually doing it, doing the emotions, which is amazing as an actor. You can’t pass up the opportunity to work with someone like that – same as when Angelina Jolie approached me.
“I take every experience on every job as a lesson and hope it’ll help me for the future, and I’m still learning now.”
Working with such experienced co-stars provided another important lesson.
“What Julia did on this movie was amazing, so honest, and George, too – he’s just such a professional,” he says. “It made a nice change to not feel like the film was being carried by what I was doing. It offered me a bit of freedom and helped me relax into the role a bit.
“With a cast like that it’s nice to take a passenger seat sometimes and let your performance complement everyone else’s.”
• Money Monster is in cinemas now
cnewbould@thenational.ae
