Jack O’Connell feels like “the bollocks”

Now that the Venice Film Festival is underway, we are allowed to fully speculate on the award season race since so many of the expected Oscar contenders will be screened in Venice this week and next week Telluride and Toronto. One of those films on the list is Danny Boyle’s Ink, which is about how The Sun became, well, The Sun – a tabloid, one of the most powerful in the world, and therefore one of the most polarising, controversial, and even dangerous publications on the planet.

The Sun is a Rupert Murdoch story, and he is played in Ink by Guy Pearce. But Rupert is not the main character. That responsibility falls on Jack O’Connell as editor Larry Lamb and his vision for the paper, the seeds he planted that would grow into what some would say impossible and toxic weeds. The first trailer for Ink was released this week ahead of its Venice debut – and this is unmistakably a Danny Boyle production: loud, obnoxious, and fun AF. Danny Boyle doesn’t always make great or even good movies, but they are more often than not a good time.

I have enjoyed Jack O’Connell throughout his entire career, even though he’s not as famous as some of the other actors in his age group. But I really, really fell in love with Jack when I saw Sinners. He was so quietly menacing, he was so quietly vulnerable – a complicated “villain” if we have to put it in those simple terms because even though he was there to literally suck the talent and art out of Sammie, his insatiable desire to take also came from a place of pain. Ryan Coogler will almost always give us a dimensional “bad guy”; it was like this with Eric Killmonger aka Michael B Jordan in Black Panther and it’s like this with Remmick in Sinners. And Jack did the most with the wonderfully layered material he was given. But he also did not do the most when the film was released and promoted. Not that he was lazy, not that he was unwilling, it was about respect, it was an understanding that this was not the project where he needed to be in the spotlight all of the time.

With Ink, though, he can step fully into it… in Dior. That’s what he was wearing in Venice last night – full drama, long coat and scarf, and totally feeling himself. As he told GQ UK, “I feel like the bollocks!”

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And you can tell he’s enjoying it on the carpet. This is main character Jack, playing an ethically compromised journalist, in a film that’s received generally pretty positive reviews and could contend for some awards, including for him. If it really works out that way, we’ll see a lot more of Fashion Jack – and this is both new for him and for us. Didn’t think we’d have Jack O’Connell on our style bingo card but now that I know he’s playing, I’m all in.