20 Underused Actors We Hope to See Break Out in 2017
By Amy Woolsey
Jack O’Connell in Starred Up (2014), image courtesy of Fox Searchlight
12. Jack O’Connell
Why you should know him: O’Connell has been hovering on the verge of breaking out for a few years. In 2014, he seemed poised for awards contention as the lead in Angelina Jolie’s World War II epic Unbroken, but the movie opened to unenthusiastic reviews and quickly faded from public consciousness. Then, last year, he had a juicy-sounding role in Jodie Foster’s Wall Street thriller Money Monster, but that movie disappointed as well, greeted with shrugs by both critics and audiences.
You might be tempted to take the fates of those movies as a sign: it’s not meant to be. But then, you watch Starred Up, Scottish director David Mackenzie’s 2013 prison drama, and you think, it has to be. As Eric Love, a juvenile offender deemed dangerous enough to be sent to an adult prison, O’Connell is downright electric, a fuse ready to explode when you are least expecting. He lacks the sort of high-wattage charm usually associated with movie stars (he cares too little about being liked), but that only makes him more fascinating to watch. He has the presence of a young Marlon Brando, minus the swaggering egotism, and the intensity of Christian Bale, minus the self-consciousness. Hell, he faces off against Ben Mendelsohn and makes the match seem at least semi-evenhanded. Yet, he doesn’t neglect Eric’s humanity, hinting at the fear and distrust buried deep underneath the kid’s hardened exterior.
Although Starred Up is O’Connell’s standout performance, he has turned in similarly gritty work in This Is England (his feature film debut, where he plays a skinhead), the TV show Skins (where he plays a troublemaking, womanizing teen), and ’71 (where he plays an inexperienced soldier). Basically, if Hollywood can’t figure out what to do with this guy soon, there is something wrong.
Upcoming projects: He’ll appear alongside Jason Clarke, Rosamund Pike, Mia Wasikowska, and Jack Reynor in the WWII thriller The Man with the Iron Heart, which sounds right up his alley, and with Alicia Vikander, Dane DeHaan, Judi Dench, and Christoph Waltz in the period drama Tulip Fever. Most intriguing of all, Andrew Haigh recently cast him as the lead in an Alexander McQueen biopic.