There are a few things 'Challengers' actor Josh O'Connor can't live without. From his scrapbooks and a photo of Helena Bonham Carter to his eye rollers and ceramics from his grandmother, these are Josh's essentials.
SAG-AFTRA members are currently on strike; as part of the strike, union actors are not promoting their film and TV projects. This interview was conducted prior to the strike.
SAG-AFTRA members are currently on strike; as part of the strike, union actors are not promoting their film and TV projects. This interview was conducted prior to the strike.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 And I'm telling you now, if you've got hay fever
00:02 or anything like that, these are great.
00:05 Hi, I'm Joshua Connor, and these are my essentials.
00:08 [upbeat music]
00:11 My camper van, who I call Winnie.
00:17 She used to be called Winston.
00:19 I don't have her here, so this is a photograph of her.
00:23 You can see a little glimpse into the inside.
00:25 That's a wood-burning stove.
00:27 That's a fridge to refrigerate things.
00:30 That's a sink to wash things.
00:32 You get the gist.
00:33 And I lived in Winnie for a lot of last year.
00:37 I was shooting a film called "La Chimera" in Italy,
00:40 and Winnie doesn't have a shower,
00:42 but I was camping out by Lake Bolsena,
00:45 which is a very beautiful lake in the middle of Italy.
00:48 And I washed myself in the lake,
00:50 and the only way to get shopping food
00:52 was to use a canoe to go into the nearby village.
00:56 So I was very fit and healthy at the end of it.
00:59 So my next item is this scrapbook.
01:02 I've been keeping scrapbooks for films and projects
01:05 and characters for quite a long time,
01:07 and this is one of them.
01:08 This is the first page of my "La Chimera" scrapbook.
01:11 "La Chimera" is about a man called Arthur,
01:14 an archeologist, and he's digging
01:16 for old Etruscan treasures and selling them
01:19 to museums for lots of money.
01:20 And it's a kind of pirate trade in the '80s.
01:23 But really, Arthur is searching for the soul
01:26 of his lost fiancee who died,
01:28 but also for something beyond life,
01:31 something that doesn't exist,
01:33 but whether it's death or the unseen or something like that.
01:36 And so a lot of my research was just about our relationship
01:39 to afterlife or to death.
01:42 That sounds very miserable, but it wasn't.
01:44 It was very joyful.
01:45 And the Etruscans saw life after death
01:48 as more meaningful than life itself.
01:51 And I feel like nowadays we have less of a connection
01:54 to spirituality and that notion.
01:57 So that was really interesting.
01:59 There's actually a poem that Aliche Rovaca,
02:02 the director, gave to me when we started this film.
02:05 And then there's all sorts of bits in here,
02:07 like obviously images,
02:10 but I also will keep bits of moss and lichen.
02:13 There's some of my drawings, bits of material.
02:16 There's all sorts of stuff in here,
02:17 but it's mostly about character stuff
02:19 and bits of writing that I found and poems and images I like.
02:24 And that was a flower that I tried to glue in.
02:27 Anyway, so this is one of my scrapbooks.
02:29 This one's a very precious one to me
02:30 because "La Chimera" was a very precious film to me.
02:33 Next essential item is this camera.
02:39 I am by no means a good photographer,
02:41 so I don't really know too much about it.
02:43 I'm pretty sure there's all sorts of bits on here
02:45 that I don't really understand.
02:47 I will take it around with me when I go in the van sometimes.
02:51 I really only take it when I go off camping or with mates.
02:55 The only time I used it professionally,
02:58 I once took photos of my friend Jesse Buckley
03:00 using this camera, and that was really good
03:02 'cause I was showing off to Jesse,
03:04 making him think that I was a professional photographer,
03:06 and I wasn't.
03:06 They very kindly gave me a photographer assistant,
03:10 and he just told me how to do everything.
03:12 So that was good.
03:13 So my next essential item is copy decks,
03:16 which is a glue, a strong adhesive for fabrics,
03:20 crafts, carpets, DIY, solvent-free,
03:22 acid-free, and easy to use.
03:24 Didn't know any of those things, but it's yours.
03:26 I'll tell you what, I'll just open it up for you.
03:28 So it's kind of, you can see it's sort of liquidy.
03:31 Got quite a horrible smell to it, actually.
03:34 But this stuff is amazing.
03:36 My grandmother used to use this.
03:38 I remember seeing it in her studio.
03:39 But it's really good for, if you like scrapbooking,
03:42 which I do, like this one.
03:45 It's really good for sticking in photographs
03:47 or anything, really.
03:48 It just does sort of do everything.
03:50 One thing I discovered it doesn't do is flowers,
03:53 like in my Macumara scrapbook,
03:55 because it just doesn't seem to work.
03:57 So good for most things, not good for
03:59 if you wanted to stick a flower somewhere.
04:02 And then these scrapbooks are personal scrapbooks,
04:06 and just images and letters that I've sent or received
04:09 or things that I like over the years.
04:12 One of the images in this scrapbook is
04:15 of the artist Yves Klein.
04:17 Yves Klein was obsessed with the color blue.
04:20 The image is him jumping off this high wall,
04:23 trying to capture blue, the blue in the sky.
04:25 And the idea behind it is that the artist needs
04:27 to take a leap of faith sometimes
04:29 in order to capture the idea,
04:31 the form that they're looking for.
04:33 When I first moved to London,
04:35 I was working three or four jobs.
04:36 I was trying to audition, trying to make it as an actor.
04:38 So I quit my jobs.
04:40 And my mum was very concerned and thought,
04:42 you're not going to survive very long in London
04:44 without a job.
04:45 I got that postcard and I wrote on the back of it and said,
04:47 sometimes as an artist, we need to take a leap of faith.
04:50 She still has it on her, on the fireplace at home.
04:53 Second image, very quickly, is a photograph
04:57 of Helena Bonham Carter.
04:58 Helena is a friend and I love her.
05:00 I wrote to her when I was 14, 15,
05:03 having read this book and I sent it
05:06 to Helena Bonham Carter.
05:07 There were all these characters and I thought,
05:08 oh, well, Helena could play that.
05:10 Such and such could play this.
05:12 And then there's this young lad who's going to play that.
05:14 And I just left a picture of my face
05:17 and my very short CV, which was like doing
05:19 the Wizard of Oz in year six.
05:21 That was on the final page.
05:22 So the idea being that she'd finished the book
05:24 and she'd go, this is great,
05:25 but who's going to play the young lad?
05:27 Anyway, I don't think she did.
05:28 I know she didn't because I've since become a friend of hers,
05:31 but she sent me that note and I've kept it ever since.
05:33 It says, dear Josh, thank you for the book.
05:35 Good luck, Helena Bonham Carter.
05:37 It's just quite a nice thing.
05:39 My next item are these face rolling devices.
05:44 Petra, who makes me look really nice and normal,
05:48 hopefully, when I do things like this,
05:50 used these recently in Cannes
05:52 and they were actually lush.
05:54 They're so nice.
05:56 And you just pop them on your face and roll them about.
06:00 And yeah, you put them in the fridge.
06:01 They're nice and cold.
06:03 And I'm telling you now,
06:05 if you've got hay fever or anything like that,
06:07 these are great.
06:09 Some of my ceramics.
06:10 They're essential because I really like them.
06:12 This is a ceramic by my grandmother.
06:15 I love it very much.
06:16 And my grandmother passed away a couple of years ago
06:19 and she was an incredible woman.
06:21 And I was left this and it's very beautiful
06:25 and I've got to figure out how to hang it.
06:27 At the moment, it's sort of rested at home,
06:30 but I really love it.
06:31 And I actually love the wood that it's attached to.
06:34 I think it's a very handsome thing.
06:36 So then the next one,
06:37 this is a very brilliant British ceramicist
06:41 called Ian Godfrey.
06:42 And this is one of his cityscapes.
06:45 It's actually a lidded vessel.
06:46 So you can see it's sort of like cityscapes
06:48 and you've got these animals,
06:50 but if you open it up,
06:51 you get a little treat with these birds that sit inside.
06:55 I love it very much.
06:58 And now this is very important
07:01 because it was given to me by my friend, Jonathan.
07:04 It's by an artist called Lucy Rhee,
07:06 who's perhaps one of the most celebrated ceramicists.
07:09 I'm not a big collector of things,
07:11 so I'm in no way looking to collect a load of stuff.
07:15 I just like the idea of looking after
07:18 these precious objects
07:20 and they're just nice to look at, aren't they?
07:23 My next item is Match A Leaf, a tree memory game.
07:27 Very simple concept.
07:28 You get a load of trees.
07:30 Like here we have beech tree here.
07:33 Then you have the leaf thereof of the beech tree.
07:37 So you put them all the cards over like this
07:40 and scatter them around.
07:41 There's loads of them.
07:42 So you go beech tree,
07:44 and then you've got this memory game.
07:45 So you've got to remember where the leaf
07:46 of the beech tree is.
07:47 There's the leaf of the beech tree.
07:49 And I appreciate it sounds very basic and perhaps tedious,
07:53 but if you like trees like me, it's not.
07:56 It's really enjoyable.
07:57 These running shoes.
08:01 Oh, here we go.
08:02 Adizero Adios Pro 3s.
08:04 They're extremely light.
08:06 I don't know if you'll be able to see in this light,
08:08 but they're kind of like almost see-through.
08:10 It's like a, I don't know what the material is.
08:12 They're amazing.
08:13 But anyway, they're essential
08:15 'cause I use them to go running.
08:17 And I actually ran the London Marathon
08:19 for the first time this year in these
08:21 for a great charity called the Samaritans.
08:24 They're very nice.
08:24 I mean, supposedly they're race shoes,
08:28 which I guess that means you use them
08:31 for things like marathons.
08:32 I feel quite cool wearing them, actually.
08:35 And that's it.
08:36 Thank you very much for watching.
08:38 (upbeat music)