La Chimera - Interview with Josh O’Connor
The Italian odyssey La Chimera, now in cinemas, as well as this month’s sexy tennis drama, Challengers, pushed O’Connor to places he’d never been before—including the gym.
MARCH 29, 2024
You also seem to know your La Chimera character very well. I know you actually sent Alice a fan letter before you were cast. What’s your origin story with her work and how that led here?
It’s a good one. My younger brother is an academic. He teaches in Edinburgh, Scotland, and he’s one of the best people I know in my life. He’s my best friend. He used to go to the cinema and call me, like he was bridging a gap and being like, “I’m interested in what you do,” which he never needs to do, because I do very little to throw myself into what he does. I’d be like, “Cool, what’d you see?” And he’d be like, “This film, Spider-Man. It’s amazing. Really interesting. Guy gets infected by this spider.” [Laughs]
So he’d go to the mainstream films. But then one day he called me and he was like, “I’ve just seen this Italian movie called Happy as Lazzaro, and I think it’s the best film I’ve ever seen.” I went and watched it that night, and I came out and I felt like I found a filmmaker that was making films for just me. So I wrote this letter, saying, “Dear Alice, I love your work. Please can we hang out?” But I had no address. She lives very remote in Italy, in this small community. No one knows where she lives. I’d write letters with a little side note on the envelope, saying, “If anyone knows where she lives, can you just get it to her?”
One day I was in Mexico, working, and I get this phone call from my agent, saying, “Alice Rohrwacher wants to have a Zoom with you.” She never received the letter. It was a pure accident that she reached out to me, not knowing that I was her biggest fan, for La Chimera.
Is that something you felt comfortable doing, reaching out to directors directly like that?
I don’t do it too often. But this movie, to me, is about destiny, and I honestly felt when I watched Alice’s movies, that I was destined to work with her. Which is very arrogant of me to think, but I guess it worked out.
What about her style felt made for you?
Those fairy tales we grow up with as kids—I’d hear them read to me by my parents and I’d be like, “God, imagine if that was actually real.” Alice gives us our modern-day fairy tales, but they are so grounded in real human feeling. La Chimera is about faith and trauma and fear and heartbreak, and all of those things are very real emotions—she puts them into this magically realistic state. I’d never seen that before in someone working today.
So what was it like to act for her? How did you observe her as a filmmaker, and actually realizing what you’re talking about?
It’s something that Alice and I share, which is hard to articulate. It’s an act of faith. We live in a time now where it’s lots of very straightforward characters—he is bad, she is good, or she is bad, he is good. Alice sees past that and she questions everything. I go into that film and I’m like, okay, there’s magic stuff, isn’t there? And she’s like, “No, it’s real. We’re not doing something magical here. This is real stuff.” Generally speaking, that’s how I approach anything anyway. But that feeling of, “Everything is totally real,” is very beautiful.
I don’t think Alice is religious in any organized way, but I would say she’s deeply spiritual and has great faith in the unseen—and why shouldn’t that be as real as the things we can see? And if you go to her house, it’s like an Alice Rohrwacher film. She grows vegetables, she lives completely remotely, everything’s self-sufficient. It’s like an artwork. So she is the real deal. She lives the characters that are in her films.
You’ve said this is the closest you’ve felt to a character. Why is that? What are the clearest parallels between you and Arthur?
One is that Arthur is constantly intrigued. He’s inquisitive. We’d be shooting in these deep forests and woodlands and the mountains, and Alice would be setting up the camera with Hélène Louvart, the cinematographer, and everyone’s getting ready. They’d be like, “Okay, where’s Josh?” I would be climbing up some hill, going through the woods, looking at birds. In part, that was me trying to be Arthur and trying to live as Arthur, but also—that is me. [Laughs] You can’t take me anywhere without losing me because something’s caught my eye and I’ve got distracted by it.
Also there’s a suit he wears in the film, which I now own. It’s such a good suit. Everything he wears in the film, I would wear. I’m not digging up tombs, [but] I am using a lot of my clothes for gardening, so they’re all muddy and torn. And it was a time in my life where I felt like an outsider. I felt a little bit lost in my life, and I didn’t know where I fit in. Arthur represented that for me.