Jack O'Connell
Jack O'Connell is an actor, born 1990.
Jack O'Connell was cast young and typed fast. Born in Derby in 1990, he turned up first as Pukey Nicholls in This Is England and then as Brett in Eden Lake, a teenage antagonist who works because he is entirely plausible rather than monstrous. James Cook on Skins made him a fixture of British television and fixed the label in place. Dark, volatile, menacing: for a while nobody offered him anything else.
The best of that run came in a single year. Eric Love in Starred Up and Gary Hook in '71, both 2014, both about a young man with no good options and a body that keeps making decisions ahead of his head. They are the performances the rest of his career is measured against, and they brought British Independent Film Award nominations.
Then Hollywood arrived. Unbroken (2014) cast him as Louis Zamperini and he took the BAFTA Rising Star Award, but the part asks him to endure rather than to act, and the American career it was built to launch never quite converted. What followed was uneven and often interesting anyway: Kyle Budwell in Money Monster, Godless with a Critics' Choice nomination, The North Water, SAS: Rogue Heroes, Peter Collins in Ferrari, Back to Black.
Sinners (2025) put him back where he belongs as Remmick, a charming, singing, deeply wrong Irish stranger, and he continues as Jimmy Crystal in 28 Years Later and its 2026 follow-up.
Movies (28)
- Sinners (2025)
- 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
- 28 Years Later (2025)
- 300: Rise of an Empire (2014)
- Eden Lake (2008)
- Lady Chatterley's Lover (2022)
- Ferrari (2023)
- Unbroken (2014)
- The Man with the Iron Heart (2017)
- Tulip Fever (2017)
- Godzilla x Kong: Supernova (2027)
- '71 (2014)
- Back to Black (2024)
- Money Monster (2016)
- Little Fish (2021)
- Harry Brown (2009)
- Starred Up (2014)
- Trial by Fire (2019)
- Seberg (2019)
- A Quiet Place Part III (2027)
- Jungleland (2020)
- Tower Block (2012)
- Private Peaceful (2012)
- This Is England (2007)
- The Liability (2012)
- United (2011)
- 9 Kisses (2014)
- Weekender (2011)
TV (6)
Where to start with Jack O'Connell
Starred Up is the one. A prison drama with a father and son in the same institution, and O'Connell plays a young man who has never been given a single tool for handling anything. Nothing else he has done is at that level.
'71 is the immediate companion, a single night in Belfast that gives him almost no dialogue and asks for everything physically.
For the origins, Eden Lake is where the menace was first weaponised and Skins is where a generation of British viewers met him. This Is England is a small part in a better film. Unbroken is the big studio swing and worth seeing for the scale of the physical commitment, even if the film flattens him. Godless is the underrated one. Sinners is the most fun he has been allowed to have on screen in years.