Jack is featured on the cover of the latest issue of Country & Town House! You can find the photoshoot and scans from the magazine in our gallery!

COUNTRY & TOWN HOUSE – Keeping It Lowkey
In the last few years, Jack O’Connell has found himself frozen stiff inside the Arctic Circle, surfing the sand dunes of the Moroccan Sahara and, most recently, careering around the Ferrari autodrome in Modena, Italy. He’s spent time falling off boats (for the BBC’s The North Water), jumping out of planes (for SAS: Rogue Heroes) and crashing cars (for Michael Mann’s forthcoming film Ferrari).

So you can see why, on the rare occasion he makes it home to the UK, he likes to take things down a notch. ‘I’ve got a nice little motorhome that I zip about in,’ he says, speaking from his house in north London. ‘I bought it because I like to go to Glastonbury and I was doing a few music festivals at the time. It just sort of appeared to be one of the best ways to do it.’

From musical beginnings the O’Connell festival bus has become something of a holiday staple. ‘I’ve managed to get a good bit of mileage on the clock. I’ve done a bit of Ireland, France; I’ve got down to Spain – it’s just a real nice way to go on holiday. No airport stress and you feel like you’re a bit more in charge. There are other stresses, don’t get me wrong – like emptying the shit tanks. But it’s good. It’s the best money I’ve ever spent.’

There can’t be that many other film stars who spend their time pootling about in a camper van, but then Jack O’Connell is not like other film stars. His upbringing in Derbyshire is well documented, to the point where he doesn’t want to go over the troubles at school and the run-ins with police again. But they’re all a part of him and his hometown evidently still means a lot: when he talks about how he came to be cast in Netflix’s recent Lady Chatterley’s Lover alongside Emma Corrin, for example, he still sees the world from a local boy’s perspective.

Becoming Lady Chatterley’s Lover
‘I was in Morocco, we were just finishing Rogue Heroes, it had been exhausting and then the last thing I wanted to do after that job was another job. But then it [Lady Chatterley] came in, I read the script and I discovered that DH Lawrence was based down the road from me [the author grew up ten miles from Derby]. So this was an opportunity to do some local literature on a pretty big stage.’

After Lady Chatterley he went on to film Ferrari, a biopic of Enzo Ferrari with Adam Driver in the title role. With Heat’s director Michael Mann at the helm, lots of fast cars and two of Hollywood’s brightest driving them, Ferrari has the makings of an instant boys’-own blockbuster. Jack plays the English racing driver Peter Collins, who raced for Scuderia Ferrari in the mid-Fifties.

Behind The Wheel Of Classic Cars
‘We shot the whole thing in Modena which is where the Ferrari garage has always been based,’ he says. ‘I was behind the wheel for most of the time and the cars we used, we had to destroy. Because they were replicas of classic cars that go for millions and Ferrari can’t afford to have replicas in circulation. So by the time we finished with them they had to be scrapped.’ Trashing Ferraris made sense in script terms – Peter Collins was killed in a crash in the 1958 German Grand Prix.
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DEADLINE – EXCLUSIVE: Jack O’Connell, Eddie Marsan and Lesley Manville have joined the ensemble cast of Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black, starring Marisa Abela as the Grammy-winning singer who died in 2011 at 27. Sam Taylor-Johnson is on board to direct the film from of StudioCanal, Focus Features and Monumental Pictures.

Focus will distribute the pic in the U.S., with Universal Pictures International handling international distribution excluding the UK, France, Germany, Australia/New Zealand, Benelux, Scandinavia and Poland which will be handled by Studiocanal. Filming is set to begin on Monday in London.

Deadline was first to report that Studiocanal and Taylor-Johnson were moving forward with the film as well as Focus’ recent involvement with the project.

O’Connell will play the love of Winehouse’s life, Blake Fielder-Civil. The two would marry in 2007, but after a tumultuous relationship that was filled with booze and drugs that led to stints in rehab, they divorced prior to Winehouse’s death.

Marsan will play Winehouse’s father, and Manville will play her maternal grandmother.

Winehouse is considered among the greatest recording artists in recent history, selling more than 30 million records worldwide and still generating more than 80 million streams per month. Her 2006 album Back to Black propelled her to stardom, earning five Grammys including Best New Artist and Record of the Year and Song of the Year for hit single “Rehab.” The film will focus on Amy’s genius, creativity and honesty that infused everything she did. A journey that took her from the craziness and color of 1990s Camden High Street to global adoration and back again, the pic crashes through the looking glass of celebrity to watch this journey from behind the mirror, to see what Amy saw, to feel what she felt.

Back to Black was written by Greenhalgh, reuniting the scribe with Taylor-Johnson following their collaboration on Nowhere Boy in 2009. Featuring many of Winehouse’s hit songs, the biopic has the full support of Universal Music Group, Sony Music Publishing and the Amy Winehouse Estate.

Alison Owen and Debra Hayward of Monumental are producing, with Nicky Kentish-Barnes executive producing. Nina Gold is leading the casting. EVP Global Production Ron Halpern and SVP Global Production Joe Naftalin executive produce and are overseeing for Studiocanal.

O’Connell continues to stay very busy with a 2022 that included the acclaimed Epix series SAS Rogue Heroes as well as the Netflix-Sony adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Next up he plays race car driver Peter Collins in Michael Mann’s Ferrari. He is repped by UTA, Conway van Gelder Grant and Sloane Offer Weber & Dern.

Connie, born into wealth & privilege, finds herself married to a man she no longer loves. When she meets Oliver, the estate’s gamekeeper, their secret trysts lead her to a sexual awakening. She faces a decision: follow her heart or return to her husband and endure what society expects of her. Starring Emma Corrin & Jack O’Connell. Directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, only on Netflix December 2

On Friday (October 14), Jack also attended a special screening and Q&A for his upcoming film Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He also attended a post premiere drinks reception. Check them out in the gallery!

On Friday (October 14), Jack attended the premiere of Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the BFI London Film Festival. It was great to see Jack out! You can find the new photos in the gallery! The film is set to release on Netflix on 2 December 2022.

Today is is Jack O’Connell’s 32nd birthday! Happy Birthday Jack! Thank you for bringing happiness into our lives with all of your projects. I can’t wait to see everything up and coming with you in the year. I hope you spend the day with all your friends and family! Here’s to another year of supporting you!

To celebrate Jack’s birthday at Jack O’Connell Web, I have added a few more additions from a photoshoot Jack did with GQ Hype last year! Enjoy!

Hello Jack fans! Last night (September 1), Jack attended the GQ Men Of The Year Awards in London. It was great to see Jack out. He looked some handsome! You can find photos from the awards in the gallery.

Public Appearances > 2021 > Sep 01 | GQ Men Of The Year Awards
Public Appearances > 2021 > Sep 01 | GQ Men Of The Year Awards (Departures)

Jack has done a great new interview and photoshoot for The Observer! You can check out the photos in the gallery and read the interview below.

THE GUARDIAN – Are you here to see man?” asks a Spanish waiter as I walk through the café garden, and points towards the table just beyond the loos where Jack O’Connell stands, his hand raised in a solemn hello. Yes I say. Yes I am.

To sit in the dark and watch Jack O’Connell’s work, from the very earliest characters he played (a boy accused of rape in The Bill, Pukey the skinhead in This Is England) through to self-destructive lad Cook in teen drama Skins and the boy incarcerated with his dad in prison drama Starred Up, followed by a squaddie in Northern Ireland in the Troubles film ’71, is to watch a slow portrait of contemporary masculinity. What O’Connell does, with his eyes and voice, and careful violence, is show the vulnerability beneath his characters’ cracked shells, and I’m keen now to find out how much of them is him, and how much of him is them, and what he’s learned about masculinity.

Unfortunately, though, it is 2021, and it has never been harder to talk about being a man, yet this is how we begin.

“It’s quite a… complex topic, isn’t it?” O’Connell says, taking a swig of his juice (flavour: red). “I grew up in a lot of genuinely macho environments. My dad played football for a team until I was seven, and I can still remember that musk of the dressing room.” This was Derby in the mid-90s, when his late dad, an Irish immigrant, worked on the railways. He wanted to be a footballer too, but injuries got in the way, and then a hairdresser, because it looked glamorous, and then he wanted to join the army, but his juvenile criminal record ruled that out. “The environment with my uncles was a jovial one, with hilarity, honesty.” He leans back. “I don’t think the term ‘toxic masculinity’ is very helpful though. It makes me feel… a certain way to see men’s lives getting clouded by it, and burdened.”

The waiter gives a jolly thumbs-up from across the room.

“Men are a chastised group within society. But my experience with male-dominated crowds was always that they were… gentleman.” Is he sweating slightly? He wipes his face, tanned after shooting in the North African desert, a series about (“Oh, you’ll love this”) the foundation of the SAS. “Misogyny is a pig-ugly trait, but you could also call it a self-absorbed, self-serving self-centredness. And no one likes a selfish cunt.” We relax for a second. “It’s tough. I mean, I read the Guardian. And a lot of time I feel targeted, just by virtue of being a lad.”

I feel bad. I intended this to be a gentle celebration of Jack and his trade, the question about men simply a fun way in, but of course I was ignoring the political fog that we’re sitting in. Would he like something to eat? I join him in an avocado toast. “I suppose, with my work, I’ve been able to explore ‘masculinity’, and those type of themes, and hope to do justice to the reality of them, as opposed to showing them in 2D.” O’Connell started acting at school, where drama classes were “a welcome change from being sent to face the wall in the corridor,” and was soon accepted into the Television Workshop in Nottingham. They met twice a week and all day Sunday, and it seems to have saved him from the kind of life he went on to play on film. On the day he was starting a show at the Royal Court in London he was in real court waiting to find out if he was getting a custodial sentence; when he came to London for auditions he’d sleep on a park bench. He has a rare talent; he credits luck. “I’m hyper-aware of just how much fortune has been involved, a series of events that simply would not happen now.”
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Jack is featured on the cover of GQ Hype. You can check out the photos from the shoot in the gallery and read his interview below where he talks about The North Water and other projects.

GQ HYPE – To see Jack O’Connell drifting on deck through the scenic fjords of Svalbard, 1,000 kilometres north of Norway, you’d never have guessed the traumas he was there to film. En route by boat to Arctic waters to shoot The North Water, a BBC survival drama set on an 1850s whaling ship, O’Connell and his cast mates Colin Farrell and Stephen Graham would soon find themselves reenacting murder, theft, on-board sexual assault and a lot of bloody seal and whale hunting. But for a short period, things were utterly peaceful and even quite temperate under the low-slung Arctic summer sun. “There were some really unforgettable moments,” recalls O’Connell, “of setting sail and ending up in these glacier fjords. Sitting there with your mates, pint in hand, going ‘Look where we are.’ It was mind-boggling.”

Mind-boggling is an apt way to describe much of The North Water, which is based on a novel by the author Ian McGuire. While most of the action takes place north of the Arctic Circle, the series begins in tropical-by-comparison Hull in 1859, where the whaling ship Volunteer is about to set sail on a final, possibly lucrative voyage to fill her hold with blubber. An early hint as to how the trip will pan out comes in the form of a cheery quotation from Schopenhauer during the opening credits: “The world is hell, and men are both the tormented souls and the devils within it.”

Among the undesirables assembled to crew the Volunteer is master harpoonist Henry Drax, played by a hirsute Farrell, and the ship’s surgeon, Patrick Sumner, who O’Connell plays. Drax, fittingly enough for an era when Darwin was the talk of Victorian society, is the living, brutal embodiment of “survival of the fittest.” A bearded man who will brutalise his crewmates for a dram of whisky or even trade his boots for a drink if there’s nobody around to rob, Drax carries a lank, latent threat and acts on pure impulse.

Sumner, meanwhile, is a surgeon and an educated man, albeit one with a murky past. A little uptight and reserved, he reads Homer and keeps a journal to try to make sense of what goes on around him – a mistake on a ship where there is no deeper meaning to life than killing for money. Sumner is also nursing a laudanum addiction triggered by the cruelty he saw in action during the Indian Mutiny and carries a belief in the rule of law that quickly puts him on a collision course with Drax. “It’s important to Sumner to maintain order,” explains O’Connell. “When there’s a victim, he takes it on board as his responsibility to see that the perpetrator is punished. That lands him in Drax’s crosshairs – he’s the target of a lethal killer.”

Sumner is quickly forced to embrace his violent side to survive the Arctic. And how violent. Almost every character in The North Water is packing a knife or a blackjack and most exist exclusively on hard spirits. Life is cheap amid the pack ice; over six parts, as madness and hardship begin to set in for the ship’s crew, the show borders on Moby Dick and Heart Of Darkness territory. “We’re refugees from civilisation,” Graham’s Captain Brownlee says of his crew at one point and the theme of a battle in each man between civilisation and savagery quickly takes root. And if Drax represents savagery then, as O’Connell explains, Sumner is the embodiment of civilisation and rationality. “Sumner has an infatuation towards Drax. He’s trying to academically understand everything, whereas Drax just feels his way through life, acting on impulse, doing whatever pleases him at the time.”
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Hi Jack fans! Back 2 weeks ago on August 4th, Jack attended a Launch Party for Bentley Motors x Macallan. You can find a few photos from the event in the gallery!