The actor on a book of ancient wisdom, the effortless cool of Fat White Family, hurling, asparagus and Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake
Born in Alvaston, Derby, in 1990, Jack O’Connell made his film debut in 2006 as reluctant neo-Nazi Pukey in Shane Meadows’s This Is England, before landing the part of Cook in Skins. Following turns in Starred Up and Harry Brown– for which Michael Caine labelled him a “star of the future” – he was cast as the lead in Angelina Jolie’s 2014 film Unbroken, about a second world war bombardier and Olympic athlete who ends up in a prisoner-of-war camp. In 2015 he won the EE rising star award at the Baftas, and the following year appeared in Jodie Foster’s Money Monster. O’Connell stars opposite Sienna Miller in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at London’s Apollo theatre from 13 July.
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