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first thing Kelly Reichardt Josh O’Connor was seen in his 2017 breakthrough film, “God’s Own Country”, in which he played sheep farmer Johnny Saxby.
“The next thing I knew about him was ‘Crown,’ but I didn’t actually realize it was the same actor. “Then I came upon it,” says Richard. I thought her face was kind of a timeless face.”
This fall, that face is everywhere. O’Connor starred in four films, including new England the romance “The History of Sound” with Paul Mescal; “Reconstruction”, in which he plays a role colorado A cattle herder whose house has been burnt down in a forest fire; Rian Johnson’s whodunit “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery”; and Reichardt’s “The Mastermind,” a heist film set in the 1970s.
It’s a confluence of wide-ranging films that showcase O’Connor’s wide-ranging talent and easy-going, raucous soulfulness. If “La Chimera” or “Challengers” haven’t already convinced you, this season should be a real onslaught of O’Connor’s loose leading-man magnetism. Even among the star-studded group of “Wake Up Deadman”, she is a standout.
But “The Mastermind,” which will be released in theaters Friday, may be the purest distillation of O’Connor’s singular screen presence. Reichardt, the filmmaker behind “First Cow” and “Showing Up,” is a writer-director who gives her actors room to breathe. In “The Mastermind”, O’Connor plays James Blaine Mooney, a suburban father named JB for short. In a reckless act of delusional confidence, he stole several paintings from his local, lightly guarded museum in Framingham, Massachusetts.
It’s Reichardt’s version of the heist film, but it’s performed with such finesse that the 35-year-old O’Connor – a longtime fan of the director – was captivated. One of the longest scenes in “The Mastermind” is not the robbery, but JB struggling to hide a stolen painting in a tree house.
“If you’ve seen Kelly’s movies, you know Kelly isn’t too worried about cutting,” says O’Connor in an interview with Reichardt. “Our eyes are used to the idea of someone going up a ladder and removing paintings, cutting up the last painting and getting a little breathless. But if we’re not going to the cinema for the observation, I don’t know what the point is.”
a real life pace
Observational perspective has long been standard practice in Reichardt’s films. They appear with such artificial naturalism that you don’t notice their subtly earned power until the final moments. In a pioneering story, “Meeks Cutoff”, he famously depicted the slow, real-time reloading of a gun in a moment of dramatic urgency. Reichardt says he is attracted to “things that are often omitted from films.”
“Sometimes I’ll watch things just to see an actor, and you don’t even get three seconds of the performance to see before it gets cut,” says Reichardt. I want to resist the pressure to cut back faster and not survive a moment because that’s what the advertising world wants from all of us.”
But in “The Mastermind,” the pace of real life allows O’Connor to immerse herself in a role that has more in common with a kind of unhinged character from a 1970s movie than anything contemporary. JB is an unemployed carpenter who lives with his wife (Alana Haim) and two young boys. His father is a judge, which gives him a sometimes ridiculous sense of authority. When JB’s haphazard scheme is exposed, he begins to wildly ruin his suburban middle-class life.
Meanwhile, the Vietnam War is raging. News reports dominate the scenes of “The Mastermind”, although JB pays little attention to it. Reichardt’s film remains firmly rooted in its time and place, but there are certain characteristics of JB that make him an unfamiliar male type today.
O’Connor says, “This is a time where things are changing. You could argue that this is the first moment of the post-truth era and marriage role dynamics are changing.” “At that time, I thought Moony is confused because he is not the breadwinner. Maybe he has thoughts that he should bring home more. Those ego issues are still present in the male psyche.”
He adds, “Things keep changing around us, but in reality, we all behave in almost the same way.”
O’Connor takes on art thieves
“The Mastermind” bears some superficial similarities to another film starring O’Connor: “La Chimera.” Like Alice Rohrwacher’s 2023 Tuscan Story, which is about an English tomb raider, O’Connor plays an art thief in a tattered suit. But if “La Chimera” gave O’Connor a melancholy character steeped in his own grief, “The Mastermind” exists in a more mundane realm.
O’Connor says of double feature films, “If I was curating, I’d be like: Here are my two favorite movies.” “But beyond the fact that he’s disheveled and wears suits, the characters are completely different. In this movie, it’s an extremely selfish, seemingly worthless guy, whereas I think there’s something more in Arthur (of “La Chimera”)… He’s searching for his soul.”
Reichardt, in his first solo screenwriting effort, first began thinking about the film at the Cannes Film Festival for “Showing Up” to premiere in 2022. She was considering art robberies and came across coverage of the 50th anniversary of the theft of paintings in broad daylight from the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts.
“I initially thought about working in a genre that would unravel,” says Reichardt. “That would be like a starting point. Ultimately, I just try to get into the character, and the place and the year and the city we’re in and what Josh’s character needs to do for the next thing. Just get into the nuances of your movie.”
Before each scene, O’Connor repeated a mantra in character: “This is a really good idea.”
“I recognize his manic nature sometimes,” he says. “To some extent, I can see how sometimes you make the wrong call and you’re in too deep. I don’t have kids, but I think I might be a little better dad than Jamie. I think I would really enjoy being a dad.”
One way that O’Connor could relate to JB is the comedown that could follow the job. “You don’t have to be a method actor to inhabit a character,” he says. And lately, O’Connor has been extremely busy. He’ll star in Steven Spielberg’s next film, due out in the spring, and recently began production on Joel Coen’s “Jack of Spades.” But what O’Connor wants most is to spend some free time at her home in the Cotswolds.
“Right now, I’m being guided by what time I have in my life with my family and friends and my garden,” O’Connor says with a smile. “It sounds a bit silly but the garden is really high on the list.”
O’Connor’s career may be skyrocketing, but it’s not the skyrocketing sky it usually is in Hollywood. His rise has been humble and a little reluctant, and it’s possible that part of what makes him such a good actor is that he’s happy outside of it, too. Unlike JB, he never had a plan.
O’Connor says, “In recent years, I don’t know that there have been any organized brainstorming plans, except that I’ve been incredibly fortunate that filmmakers like Kelly have wanted to work with me.” “I keep teasing myself over and over again: How did this happen? I’m really lucky to get to work with people I wouldn’t be able to say no to.”