The first thing Kelly Reichardt saw Josh O’Connor in was his 2017 breakthrough film, “God’s Own Country,” in which he played the sheep farmer Johnny Saxby.
“The next thing I knew of him was ‘The Crown,’ but I didn’t really realize it was the same actor. Then I got hip to that,” Reichardt says. “I thought he had a kind of timeless face.”
This fall, that face is everywhere. O’Connor stars in four films, including the New England romance “The History of Sound,” with Paul Mescal; “Rebuilding,” in which he plays a Colorado rancher whose home is taken by wildfires; Rian Johnson’s whodunit “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery”; and Reichardt’s “The Mastermind,” a 1970-set heist movie.
It’s a convergence of wide-ranging movies that showcase O’Connor’s rangy talent and innate, scruffy soulfulness. If “La Chimera” or “Challengers” didn’t already convince you, this season should be a veritable onslaught of O’Connor’s loose leading-man magnetism. Even among the star-studded ensemble of “Wake Up Deadman,” he’s the standout.
But “The Mastermind,” which opens in theaters Friday, may be the purest distillation of O’Connor’s singular screen presence. Reichardt, the filmmaker of “First Cow” and “Showing Up,” is a writer-director who gives her actors room to breathe. In “The Mastermind,” O’Connor plays a suburban father named James Blaine Mooney, J.B. for short. In a haphazard act of delusional self-confidence, he steals several paintings from his local, lightly guarded museum, in Framingham, Massachusetts.
It’s Reichardt’s version of a heist movie, but one carried out with a granular rigor that the 35-year-old O’Connor — a longtime fan of the director — was drawn to. One of the lengthiest scenes in “The Mastermind” isn’t the heist, but J.B. struggling to hide the stolen paintings in a treehouse.
“If you’re seen Kelly’s movies, you know that Kelly is not overly concerned with cutting,” says O’Connor in an interview alongside Reichardt. “Our eyes are used to someone going up a ladder and putting a painting away, cut to the final painting and he’s a bit out of breath. But if we’re not going to cinema to be observational, I don’t know what the point is.”
A real-life pace
An observational perspective has long been standard practice in Reichardt’s films. They tend to unfold with such textured naturalism that you don’t notice their subtly accrued power until the last moments. In “Meek’s Cutoff,” a pioneer tale, she famously depicted the slow, real-time reloading of a musket, in a moment of dramatic urgency. Reichardt says she’s “drawn to the things that are often cut out of movies.”
“Sometimes I watch things to look at an actor, and you can’t even find three seconds of a performance to look at before there’s a cut,” says Reichardt. I want to resist the push to cut faster and not be able to live in a moment just because that’s what the advertising world wants from all of us.”
But in “The Mastermind,” a real-life pace allows O’Connor to sink into a role that has more in common with a kind of unmoored character from a 1970s film than anything contemporary. J.B. is an out-of-work carpenter living with his wife (Alana Haim) and two young boys. His father is a judge, which gives him a sometimes-comical sense of entitlement. When J.B.’s haphazard plan unravels, he seems to be wantonly sabotaging his suburban middle-class life.
Meanwhile, the Vietnam War is raging. News reports filter into scenes in “The Mastermind,” though J.B. takes little notice. Reichardt’s film is firmly rooted in its time and place, but there are characteristics of J.B. that make him a not unfamiliar male type today.
“It’s a time where things are changing. You could argue it’s the first moments of the post-truth era and marriage role dynamics are shifting,” says O’Connor. “At the time, I thought Mooney is confused because he’s not the breadwinner. Maybe he’s got ideas that he should be bringing home more. Those issues of ego in the male psyche still exist.”
“Things change around us,” he adds, “but, really, we all behave pretty much the same way.”
O’Connor’s rumpled art thieves
“The Mastermind” bears some superficial similarities with another film starring O’Connor: “La Chimera.” Like Alice Rohrwacher’s 2023 Tuscan fable about an English tomb raider, O’Connor plays an art thief in a rumpled suit. But if “La Chimera” gave O’Connor a melancholic character tunneling into his own grief, “The Mastermind” exists in a more mundane realm.
“If I was curating, I’d be like: Here are two of my faves,” O’Connor says of the films as a double feature. “But beyond the fact that he’s disheveled and wears suits, the characters are completely different. In this film, it’s an extremely selfish, seemingly useless guy whereas I think Arthur (of “La Chimera”) has got a bit more … he’s looking for his soul.”
Reichardt, in her first solo screenwriting effort, first began thinking about the film while at the Cannes Film Festival to premiere “Showing Up” in 2022. She was perusing art heists and came across 50th anniversary coverage of the broad-daylight theft of paintings from the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts.
“I did in the beginning think of working in a genre that would unravel,” Reichardt says. “That would be like a jumping off point. Ultimately, I just try to get into the character, and the place and the year and the town we’re in and the specifics of what Josh’s character needs to do for the next thing. Just get into the minutia of your own movie.”
Before every scene, O’Connor repeated a mantra, in character: “This is a really good idea.”
“I identify with the sort of manic nature of him sometimes,” he says. “To a lesser extent, I can see how sometimes you make the wrong call and you’re in too deep. I don’t have kids, but I’d like to think I’d be a slightly better father than Jamie. I think I’d really enjoy being a father.”
One way that O’Connor could relate to J.B. is the comedown that can follow a job. “You don’t have to be a Method actor to live with a character,” he says. And lately, O’Connor has been extremely busy. He stars 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 most wants is some down time at his home in the Cotswolds.
“Right now, I’m being guided by what gets me time in my own life with my family and friends and my garden,” O’Connor says, smiling. “It sounds sort of silly but the garden really is up there on the list.”
O’Connor’s career might be skyrocketing, but it’s not the skyrocketing that usually happens in Hollywood. His rise has been humble and a little reluctant, and it’s possible that what makes him such a good actor is that he’s happy outside of it, too. Unlike J.B., he never had a plan.
“In recent years, I don’t know that there’s been an organized thought-through plan other than I’ve been incredibly lucky that filmmakers like Kelly want to work with me,” O’Connor says. “I keep pinching myself to be like: How has this happened? I’ve been really fortunate that I’ve got to work with people I wouldn’t be able to say no to.”
