Brenock O'Connor
Brenock O'Connor is an actor, born 2000.
Playing Olly in Game of Thrones is a peculiar first big job. The part gave O'Connor scenes opposite the show's leads at the height of its cultural reach, and it also handed him one of the characters Game of Thrones audiences most enjoyed resenting. He never plays for sympathy in it, which is the right call and probably cost him some goodwill: Olly is a boy hardened by circumstance into certainty, and O'Connor gives him no charm to soften the edges.
The follow-ups were steadier. Peter Cratchit in Dickensian, a regular run on the comedy Living the Dream, and then Tom Harris across four years of Alex Rider, where he does the useful, unglamorous work of making an espionage thriller feel like it involves actual teenagers. On film he has taken small parts in small pictures: Julian Bell in Vita and Virginia, a lead in the thriller Double Blind, a role in the wartime drama Another Mother's Son.
He also records music under the name McGovern, and the acting CV here is short enough that the music is not a footnote to it.
Movies (5)
TV (3)
Where to start with Brenock O'Connor
Skip the obvious answer and start with Alex Rider. Tom Harris is the largest part he has had, it runs for years, and it lets him be funny, which nothing else on this list does. The show is also a rare teen thriller that treats its audience as capable of following a plot.
Game of Thrones is the one people will ask about, and Olly is worth watching for the discipline of the performance rather than for any pleasure in the character. Dickensian is the best-looking thing he is in, a strange and enjoyable mash-up of Dickens novels that deserved more than one series. Double Blind is a small genre film and a fair test of whether you want to follow the career. Vita & Virginia gets you one scene of him in a very good period cast.