As Jack O’Connell was finishing up his work playing the jig-dancing vampire Remmick in “Sinners,” he had to turn his attention to another character with a seemingly insatiable bloodlust. In a matter of weeks he would have to become Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, a violent cult leader in a postapocalyptic Britain decimated by the rage virus first depicted in Danny Boyle’s 2002 classic, “28 Days Later.”
Jimmy, who wears a purple tracksuit and a tiara, briefly makes his first appearance at the end of Boyle’s follow-up, “28 Years Later,” but comes to full horrifying fruition in the new “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,” directed by Nia DaCosta. Between Remmick and Jimmy, the 35-year-old O’Connell is establishing himself as one of the most terrifying presences in current cinema.
What the characters share is that “they’re not conscious of it being wrong or bad to them, it’s their norm,” he said in the low light of a downtown Manhattan bar, adding that once you settle into that mentality, it’s “a little boundless.”
Despite the similarities, playing two villains back to back was a chance to show his range.
“To me, it was important to use it as an opportunity to demonstrate distinction,” he said.
O’Connell has been working professionally since he was a teenager, but his turn as Remmick, who gleefully breaks up the juke joint party in the director Ryan Coogler’s hit, has elevated his profile in Hollywood. He calls London home and when we spoke in early January, it was the first time he had been back to the United States since “Sinners” was released in April and became the highest-grossing live-action original film since “Inception” in 2010.
“People are approaching me today about it,” he said. “It’s so flattering. So rewarding.”
While Remmick is a bloodsucker, Jimmy Crystal might be even more brutal. He’s less interested in killing the infected rampagers than in mutilating humans as ritualistic sacrifice. Still, Alex Garland’s screenplay makes it clear where Jimmy’s perversions originated. As a child he watched his family being annihilated while his father, a vicar, welcomed the undead horde as evidence of God’s judgment.
Now an adult, Jimmy clings to childhood fantasy and has fashioned his look partly after the Teletubbies and partly after the popular television presenter Jimmy Savile. After Savile’s death in 2011, his decades of sexual abuse, often of children, came to light. In the universe created by Boyle and Garland, Jimmy wouldn’t know about Savile’s crimes. The world effectively ended in the early 2000s.
After leaks of early photos of the actors playing Jimmy’s followers, who also dress like Savile, The Sun called it a “sick twist.” O’Connell doesn’t mind that the evocation ruffles some feathers.
“Culture disintegrated and fell apart,” he said of the movie’s alternate history of Britain, adding, “To my mind, it’s a sort of commentary on what can happen with unchecked power.”
He does concede, however, that the look “certainly exists in order to unsettle.”
O’Connell is familiar with unsettling audiences. He grew up in Derby, in the center of England, with an Irish father who worked for a railroad company and an English mother.
He got his first taste of acting when he was in Catholic school and through that was referred to what was known as the Carlton Junior Television Workshop, a then-free program best known at the time for counting Samantha Morton as an alumna.
When he was 14, he shot his first film role, playing a skinhead in the drama “This Is England” (2007). At 17, he became a bad-boy heartthrob when he joined the cast of “Skins” as the unpredictable Cook. DaCosta was part of the generation of viewers who were taken with the often-scandalous “Skins,” she said in a video interview.
“That character’s like so dangerous,” she said. “That was my first touchstone for Jack.”
O’Connell’s initial taste of mainstream Hollywood attention came in a far more heroic flavor when he starred in Angelina Jolie’s World War II drama, “Unbroken” (2014), as the Olympian Louis Zamperini. The film was an Oscar hopeful and O’Connell was still in the process of understanding how the business worked, shaking off a reputation for bad boy behavior offscreen.
He said in those days “it was alien” to him to be making the rounds dressed in nice suits. Now, he’s a lot more prepared. In fact, the Prada logo on his tan sweater was peeking out from his leather jacket.
When DaCosta was brought on to direct “The Bone Temple,” O’Connell was already in the running for the role of Jimmy, but Boyle consulted with her. She was on board.
“I can’t even imagine anyone else doing it,” she said, adding, “He’s so intense but also really warm. He’s got an edge to him but also so like soft and cuddly.”
Indeed, O’Connell exuded a quiet calm during our interview. He speaks softly but with an intensity directed toward his work. O’Connell was eager to be a part of any project associated with Boyle, a “boyhood hero” of his thanks to “Trainspotting” (1996), “The Beach” (2000) and other films.
Just before heading to New Orleans to film “Sinners,” he met with Boyle and DaCosta at Boyle’s house, where O’Connell rooted through the collection of vinyl, books and DVDs to quell his nerves while waiting.
“I’m losing my mind,” he said, describing the experience.
Although Jimmy represents a sort of undiluted evil that emerged in the wake of the apocalypse, O’Connell pretty early settled on the words “twisted gaiety” to represent how he wanted to portray the character. He was eager to bring a flamboyance to the part, working with the costume designers Gareth Pugh and Carson McColl to come up with the purple velour tracksuit he wears. It’s turned into a prized possession.
“I feel attached to it,” he said. “I have the tiara. I just need the wig.”
DaCosta explained that together they wanted to strike a balance in which O’Connell’s physicality doesn’t always need to be threatening, but when he turns on his menace, it’s terrifying.
The same could be said for his performance as Remmick, who is eerily charming as he plucks a banjo despite the general unease he brings to the proceedings.
“When Jack walks into the room you’re not like, ‘Ooh, danger’s here,’” DaCosta said. “But he has a real presence. I think playing with that sense of presence is something he does really well.”
O’Connell did have some fear that taking on both “Sinners” and the “28 Years Later” movies back to back would lead to typecasting, but that was tempered by the fact that the worlds he had to occupy were so different.
And he won’t have to wait long until moviegoers can see him in a different light. Just before Christmas he finished the drama “Ink,” about the rise of Rupert Murdoch, in which he plays the newspaper editor Larry Lamb, the man who brought topless models to the pages of The Sun newspaper. The film reunites O’Connell with Boyle, whose early works blew O’Connell’s teenage mind.
“There definitely comes a point where you have to go, ‘right, stop idolizing him,’” O’Connell said.
He’s also eager to develop his own projects and return to the theater, which he hasn’t done since appearing alongside Sienna Miller in a 2017 production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in London. He gets a thrill out of being a “cog in a machine” in the collective act of performing.
“For me, what gets me out of bed in the morning is being on set in the piss and vinegar,” he said.
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