Josh O'Connor

I think of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Gene Wilder, Meryl Streep, you know, people that I really look up to.

There is a sort of...

magic that happens and it's very hard to articulate and I don't know that I have the tools to articulate it really but I think that there is a kind of a level of the spiritual in terms of a character that is accessed by performers like that and I don't know it's like that sounds kind of um

highfalutin and pretentious, but I don't know how else to describe it.

Yeah, for sure.

And by the way, like, rarely have I achieved it.

Maybe never.

No, I don't really.

But it's less about an arrival.

It's more about the pursuit.

And I think I can see that with other performers as well.

You know, I think one of my great friends, Jesse Buckley, who just gave this extraordinary performance in Hamnet.

You know, Jesse...

It has that similar quality, I think, of someone who's pursuing the spiritual, the kind of the spirit or the soul of a character rather than just replicating something.

I remember struggling with reading.

I found reading harder than, you know, when you're seven or eight and you're reading in class and everyone's taking their turns to read a sentence or two.

And I just remember I was struggling with that in a way that I could see other kids weren't.

I certainly remember at the age of 11, 10 or 11, I went and did a test and they ran this test.

And I remember saying to the person who ran the test,

At the end of it, they said to me, so, Josh, what do you think dyslexia is?