Our Favourite Josh O'Connor Movies

Josh O’Connor is everywhere these days. He’s on my screen, my Instagram feed, press photos. One day I’m watching him as a hot sexy priest in Wake Up Dead Man; the next, he’s on Saturday Night Live, joking about looking like a stop-motion rat.

Since detonating expectations as Prince Charles on The Crown—a performance so nervy it made royal misery feel almost avant-garde—O’Connor has built one of the most interesting filmographies of his generation. He plays men who are blocked, bruised, sexually confused, morally compromised, or quietly collapsing under the weight of their own interior lives. He’s kissing Zendaya in a sweaty tennis drama, speaking Italian while robbing tombs in rural Tuscany, and popping up in period dramas.

His performances are slow burns. They linger. They get under your skin and stay there. Which is exactly why, right now, he’s one of the most interesting actors to watch—and why his movies are worth revisiting in full.

With Spielberg (Disclosure Day) and Joel Coen (Jack of Spades) waiting in the wings, O’Connor now finds himself on the brink of something resembling movie stardom.

Best Josh O'Connor Movies

Until then, these are the Josh O’Connor movies you should be watching.

God’s Own Country (2017)

Francis Lee’s raw, elemental romance drops O’Connor into the Yorkshire mud as Johnny Saxby, a young farmer whose emotional vocabulary extends little beyond clenched jaws, excessive drinking, and self-sabotage. When Gheorghe, a Romanian migrant worker, enters his life, the film refuses easy sentimentality. Desire is awkward. Affection is learned. Love is labour.

O’Connor’s performance is almost aggressively physical—his pain lives in posture, in how he handles animals, in how he avoids eye contact. God’s Own Country didn’t just mark a career turning point, it also positioned O’Connor as an actor unafraid of queer intimacy, emotional exposure, or characters who are difficult to love before they are worthy of it.

Emma (2020)

Against all expectations, O’Connor is hilarious in Autumn de Wilde’s hyper-stylised Emma. As Mr Elton—the obsequious, socially ambitious village vicar—he plays Austenian entitlement at full volume. This is not the gentle clergyman of polite adaptations past. This is a man vibrating with neediness, ego, and barely concealed rage.

What makes the performance sing is its total lack of restraint. O’Connor leans into excess: the simpering smiles, the sudden emotional pivots, the wounded pride. It’s a reminder that comedy, when done well, is as precise as tragedy. In a film filled with immaculate performances, his Mr Elton is grotesque and unforgettable.

Mothering Sunday (2021)

Set in the hush of post–World War I England, Mothering Sunday is built on silences. As Paul Sheringham, the privileged son of landed gentry engaged to someone else, O’Connor delivers a performance of devastating restraint. His affair with Odessa Young’s Jane Fairchild is tender, doomed, and shaped by class more than emotion.

O’Connor understands repression instinctively. He lets it sit in his shoulders, in the pauses between words, in the way Paul seems already to be grieving a future he knows he won’t choose.

Aisha (2022)

In Frank Berry’s Aisha, O’Connor wisely steps back. The film belongs to Letitia Wright’s Aisha Osagie, a Nigerian asylum seeker trapped in Ireland’s dehumanising Direct Provision system. O’Connor plays Conor, a former prisoner working as a security guard, who befriends her.

By refusing to centre himself, O’Connor strengthens the film’s moral clarity and reinforces his reputation for choosing projects with purpose over prestige.

Challengers (2024)

Patrick Zweig is, on paper, a nightmare: disgraced tennis pro, emotional saboteur, walking embodiment of unresolved desire. In Luca Guadagnino’s sweaty, kinetic Challengers, O’Connor makes him irresistible. He’s cocky, bitter, seductive, and heartbroken—all at once.

What could have been a stock “bad boy” becomes something sadder and stranger. O’Connor uses movement as character—how Patrick lounges, prowls, watches. The result is one of the most fascinating love triangles in recent cinema, anchored by a performance that refuses to behave.

La Chimera (2023)

Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera might be O’Connor’s finest work to date. As Arthur, a British archaeologist drifting through 1980s Tuscany, he plays a man emotionally entombed—digging up the past while unable to escape his own grief. He speaks Italian. He looks permanently unmoored. He is, somehow, both ridiculous and devastating.

Arthur is a loser, yes—but a romantic one, haunted by loss and driven by longing. O’Connor lets the character fray, unravel, and drift without forcing coherence.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

In Rian Johnson’s latest whodunnit, O’Connor plays Father Jud Duplenticy, a boxer-turned-priest whose faith is forged in guilt and sustained by quiet defiance. Opposite Daniel Craig’s flamboyant Benoit Blanc, O’Connor keeps his own and almost makes being a priest sexy.

Jud is observant, contained, and deeply unreadable. Is he naïve? Complicit? Manipulative? O’Connor keeps the answer just out of reach, grounding the film’s more theatrical elements with moral tension.

The Mastermind (2025)

Set against 1970s American malaise, The Mastermind gives O’Connor the kind of role he excels at: a man drowning quietly. As J.B. Mooney, a former art student turned suburban husband plotting a small-time museum heist, he plays mediocrity with startling empathy.

O’Connor refuses the antihero playbook. Instead, he gives us a man whose failure feels painfully recognisable.