Josh O’Connor has carved out a very English profile in his career, having translated Prince Charles in The Crown for Netflix and imported an Oscar Wilde-ian insouciance to the American tennis player Patrick Zweig in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. O’Connor’s face, in close-up, can telegraph a deep well of unspoken emotion or an arch invitation to bad behavior. He is, in short, a romantic.

O’Connor, who lives in the English countryside outside of London, brings a certain bemused curiosity to his life and art. When he met director Kelly Reichardt to discuss a role in her next film, The Mastermind, which he is currently shooting, he found himself “overawed” by their meeting place in New York: a lobster shack.

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“The two words, lobster and shack, to me, are bizarre,” he laughs. “I know they’re kind of common in America, but lobster here is the food of the kings, a rare cuisine, like a delicacy.”

We’re thrilled to have O’Connor as part of our 2025 Hollywood Issue. Here, he discusses his origins and inspirations as an artist, the complications of expressing different sexualities onscreen, and his ideal place in the world, far from Hollywood or New York City.

Vanity Fair: You learned Italian for La Chimera, animal husbandry for God’s Own Country, and tennis for Challengers. Are you attracted to roles that force you to learn entirely new skills?

Josh O’Connor: The act of acting is a state of bliss for me, but I think I’ve always had a curious mind to other skills and crafts. I can’t say that I’m a very good tennis player and I definitely can’t say that I’m a fluent Italian speaker, but they are two things that for a calendar year I was consumed with and studying. To be really, really honest with you, the other advantage is that you get free tennis lessons, free Italian lessons, you know, paid out by the production company. It’s a perk of the job.

You’ve signed on to the next Kelly Reichardt film. What’s the next skill you’ll be taking up?

Well, slightly alarmingly, Kelly emailed me two days ago saying, “What are we going to do about the wood craft that you do in the movie?” I had just completely skated over it, like, “Oh, it’ll be easy,” but she’s actually right. So that’s my next skill. For The History of Sound, I had to learn a bit of piano, which I really enjoyed, and I had to sing with Paul Mescal, who’s actually a very good singer. I had to try and keep up with him.

Who do you look to for inspiration? Are younger actors like yourself still looking to icons like Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson?

The De Niros of the world still influence me and many of my peers today. Just last week, I revisited Dog Day Afternoon and was just admiring Al Pacino and John Cazale. There’s no secret that Daniel Day-Lewis is a big hero of mine, and is for most actors, I think. But of the next wave, someone who I really admire and look up to is Jesse Plemons. I watched Civil War recently and Jesse is in just this one scene. And it’s insane. He just pops up and he’s so good. I’d heard that he was just there [on set], and I don’t know if someone dropped out or something, but it was like, “Jesse, will you play this part?” And he was like, “Yeah, I’ll give it a go.” And then he does that. But I have influences all over the place, people I’ve worked with, like Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, Olivia Colman, Tobias Menzies, Emma Corrin.

Your grandparents were well-regarded artists and writers. Did you have close relationships with them growing up and did it inform how you saw yourself as a creative person?

I was very close with my grandmother [ceramicist Romola Jane Farquharson] and she lives in the same town as my family so I spent a lot of time with her. She was a very brilliant ceramicist, but she would sketch everything, and the way she saw the world was artistic.

Ceramics is sort of my big passion. That’s partly, I’m sure, down to the fact that my grandmother was a ceramicist, and I do dabble. I can make some things, but not particularly attractive things. I’d love to spend more time in the studio making pots.

Some of my biggest influences are my parents. My mum was a midwife and my dad was an English teacher at my school, but both were incredibly artistic. My dad writes amazing poetry and he was responsible for taking me to my first theater shows, Shakespeare. And my mom paints. So art was kind of all around as a child. There were no actors in my family, so that was like a new thing, although I think my mom likes to think she could have been an actress.

Your artistic bent seems to have informed your choice of films and directors, whether La Chimera or The Mastermind. From the outside, you don’t seem very Hollywood.

I have great friends who live in LA, or work in LA, and a few of them grew up in LA. And so there’s a kind of cultural normality to it. For me, Hollywood is actually not real. Even when I am in LA, I’m like, This doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel real. I grew up with theater, and theater will probably always be my first love.

But you’re right, I sometimes think there’s a wrong kind of separation of Hollywood from independent or art house movies. We’re all doing the same thing. We’re all telling stories and people tell stories in very different ways. You could argue that Challengers is a Hollywood movie, but Luca Guadagnino is directing it, and he’s an artist. And likewise, you could say Kelly Reichardt has stuck with her roots and makes independent films. And I would argue that her films are so universal that—why aren’t they on [the big screen], you know? It’s a weird distinction, on the one hand; on the other hand, I totally understand why there is a distinction. But there is a mythology surrounding Hollywood. When I go to LA, I still ask Uber drivers to stop so I can take a picture.

There is some controversy about straight actors playing gay characters. You’ve played gay characters in two movies, God’s Own Country and the forthcoming The History of Sound. What’s your philosophy? Do you have any reservations about it?

It’s a really difficult subject. The truth is that ultimately I will read a script and what affects me, affects me. The History of Sound is a film about many things. For instance, it’s about grief. It’s about companionship. It’s also about music. It’s about what happens in life when you fall in love with someone, and maybe that connection is broken, you know? The other character from God’s Own Country was someone who was unable to love and be loved and receive love. A character’s sexuality, a character’s background, where they’ve grown up, their dynamic with their family—these are all aspects to any character, and so I take those as seriously as I would any other aspect. But to be totally truthful, I’m not 100% sure how I do feel about it. I think I have mixed feelings.

Your costar Paul Mescal has said he finds it easier to play gay sex scenes than it is to play tenderness after sex. The chemistry of the relationship is more difficult, more complicated.

A sex scene is a very strange thing. It’s the least sexy thing in the world. You can ask Mike Faist and Zendaya about that. It might look sexy onscreen, but in reality, it’s the same as a fight sequence, a bit of action or stunt, or a dance. It’s a very choreographed, rehearsed thing, and you’re surrounded in a room full of people—someone’s holding a boom microphone and camera and lights. I see what [Paul] means. On the other hand, being vulnerable and intimate with another actor is more revealing, and scarier, because you’re often having to reach for something inside you that sometimes is blocked away or hidden, whatever it is, and that can be intimidating.

I’m always impressed by just how empathetic you can be onscreen. And if it looks and feels real, then you’ve honored the emotion of it, right?

It’s a funny thing actually, even the idea of capturing reality is a tricky concept for me, because sometimes—and this is putting my audience hat on—sometimes you don’t necessarily want “real.” We’ve been telling stories as a civilization from year naught, and the act of storytelling can take many forms. You just have to look at the way Luca Guadagnino tells a story, or Alice Rohrwacher, or Kelly [Reichardt], or Martin Scorsese, or [Luc] Dardenne.

Speaking of real and unreal, I’m obliged to ask you about Prince Charles. Have you yet received any feedback from Charles himself about your portrayal in The Crown, directly or indirectly?

No. I’m the same as you, I’d love to know. I’ve not heard a thing. I guess he’s been quite busy.

My heart goes out to him in these times, but I’ve said it many times, I have great affection for him. I don’t know him—

Affection for who you think he is, yeah…

For the person who I’ve done lots of research on, like a weird stalker. He’s done an awful lot of good, in spite of a pretty bizarre life.

Does the Prince Charles role shadow you in some ways? Do you carry that around with you at all?

I don’t know if I do, to be honest. And I’ll tell you why I think I don’t. These are characters. When I started working on Charles, I wasn’t overly excited at the idea of playing a real person. The prospect of playing someone who exists, particularly someone who is present in our national psyche, was very daunting. The one film that I referenced in my head, that I loved, was Todd Haynes on Bob Dylan [I’m Not There]. The reason I love that movie was the conceit that we don’t know who Bob Dylan is. Joe’s Bob Dylan is going to be very different to my Bob Dylan, which is going to be very different to my dad’s Bob Dylan. Whatever he is, let’s put eight actors playing different aspects of Dylan and let’s present it. That’s filmmaking at its finest. So with Charles, it was like, I did the research, everything that helps put together a script, but I never see it as having played Prince Charles.

You owe him nothing. You don’t have to feel guilty about it.

I just don’t want to feel guilty. This is how I excuse myself.

You lived in New York for a time. Did you enjoy it?

[Long pause.] The delay suggests I didn’t, but I did. Here’s the thing—I think New York might be my favorite city in the world, and I don’t think I want to live there.

Is it important to you to stay connected to some space that feels more rooted to you?

I think so. The landscapes that we grew up with shape us. After maybe 10, 11, 12 years in London, and two years, if that, in New York, I was ready to get back to the hills and the fields and the water.

You’re a fan of the book Waterlogged, about swimming across England in wild streams, rivers, and ponds. Are you still a wild swimmer?

Yes! But the thing is, Joe, I’m not a good swimmer.

Are you a wader?

No, not a wader. I’ll get in. It doesn’t count unless you’re submerged. But, for instance, I had some friends over a couple of weekends ago, and there’s a beautiful pond near my house. I was like, “Come on, let’s go for a swim.” And they actually swam the length of the thing. I was like, “You guys are crazy.” And they were like, “That’s swimming.” I love being in the water, but I’m not a very strong swimmer. One of my favorite things from that book is he describes just lying flat and floating, the currents taking him down the river, and he’s looking up and he’s seeing the structure of the trees like veins. And then he can hear different things—that’s my kind of swimming.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. For fashion and beauty details, go to VF.com/credits.