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September 2, 2026

Guy Pearce, Jack O’Connell, Claire Foy, Danny Boyle

Words by JANE CROWTHER

James Graham’s award-winning West End and Broadway hit charting the birth of Britain’s The Sun newspaper and tabloid culture served the drama without op-ed – leaving the audience to decide on the morals and ethics at play, and the Pandora’s box such practice opened. Danny Boyle (with Graham adapting his work for screen) makes no apology for drawing a direct line between the ‘move-fast-break-things’ MO of newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch and his editor, Larry Lamb, and the latter-day rule-breaking narrators shaping our world. The epoch of The Sun, he posits, is the hellmouth for our problematic 21st century media landscape – that Murdoch and Lamb have blood, as well as ink, on their hands. And that we, as consumers, are as voracious as any hack hounding a story. But there’s also admiration for the underdog ambition and anti-establishment disruption of the endeavour, told with antsy Trainspotting verve and a nostalgic respect for the craft of physical media. 

Guy Pearce, Jack O’Connell, Claire Foy, Danny Boyle
Anthony Dickenson/StudioCanal

Bookended by two meetings at Rules restaurant in London, Ink begins in 1969 with Aussie businessman Murdoch (Guy Pearce) making Northern journalist Lamb (Jack O’Connell) an offer he can’t refuse over a lobster dinner; editorship of an ailing broadsheet, with no guard rails and the opportunity to stick one in the eye of Fleet Street’s old boy’s network. Wily Lamb immediately tells Murdoch the principles of a good story – the 5 W’s: who, what, where, when and why. The ‘why’ he says, is the least important but it’s an element that drives the tale here with both men’s motivation explored. Ambitious Lamb is hellbent on besting his former employers at The Mirror as well as rattling a London-centric, middle-class and public school establishment that hazed him as a newbie. Murdoch’s desire to screw colonialism comes into focus as he amasses media companies with gimlet-eyed precision while being named ‘the dirty digger’ by Private Eye. 

Guy Pearce, Jack O’Connell, Claire Foy, Danny Boyle
Anthony Dickenson/StudioCanal

While the ‘why’ percolates, the who, what, where and when is provided as Lamb corrals a scrappy editorial team together like Danny Ocean recruiting his heist gang, enticing specialist journos onboard from Fleet Street bars, bathhouses and in the case of new women’s editor, Jules (a composite character and played by Claire Foy), his extra-marital bed. Moving as fast as the printing presses that are constantly heard as a low thrum throughout the action, Lamb’s initial building of a tabloid is a thrilling and amusing spectacle. In a smoke-filled newsroom of clattering typewriters and stories being slapped on spikes, Lamb demands his team make their work ‘louder’, conducting a brainstorming session to identify the real interests of the working man. TV, sport, personalities, weather and sex are top of the agenda, with the words ‘win’, ‘free’ or ‘love’ on the cover nabbing his staff a bonus. As the circulation figures creep up, the giveaways get sillier (knickers in a tin) and the presses roar, with Boyle leaning into framing and lighting that evokes Citizen Kane and a fondness for a lost world soundtracked by IDLES’ The New Sensation. Lamb swaggers through his domain demanding more WOBs (white on black text), italics, dog’s dicks (exclamation points), bangers (design roundels) as the typesetters sweat over the galley and chase… the sort of Fleet Street nerdism that demands a linotype advisor on the film’s credits.

It’s exhilarating stuff loaded with archival footage and AI-animated Getty images which showcase Murdoch and Lamb’s particular brand of fearless entrepreneurship, and leads them to the Press Council Awards where the elitism and bullying of the industry is laid bare. ‘The Aussie sheep farmer – a seat at the table’ Murdoch glowers of his personal oneupmanship. There is, of course, a price… rats are scuttling around the newsroom, there’s hypocrisy in exposing the failings of public figures and, when a Sun exec’s wife is kidnapped, real consequences in the way Lamb chooses to package the news. Shuttling through the arrival of page three girls, Thatcher, Murdoch’s empire expansion and Lamb’s successor, Kelvin MacKenzie, Boyle speeds up the flickering images to bring us to the sobering present via Princess Diana, Caroline Flack, Zuckerberg, Musk and Trump. 

Guy Pearce, Jack O’Connell, Claire Foy, Danny Boyle
Anthony Dickenson/StudioCanal

Considering the TS Eliot quote that closes this story, it would be easy to simply despise the players but in the hands of Pearce and O’Connell, Murdoch and Lamb remain complex human figures. Pearce’s clenched Murdoch, not yet a media baron, is a fascinating work in progress, while O’Connell gives Lamb a drive and charm that carries some of his more morally dubious choices into pathos. And Boyle’s ability to eddy audiences along with propulsive music, editing and strong period detail is like being sat on one of the tube trains that constantly hurtle through the piece. Entertainment is what Murdoch wanted from his newspaper and it’s what Boyle delivers here.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images courtesy of STUDIOCANAL/NETFLIX
Ink premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival and will be in cinemas 11 December

28 YEARS LATER

June 20, 2025

28 Years Later, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alfie Williams, Danny Boyle, Jack O‘Connell, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes

Words by JANE CROWTHER

Danny Boyle’s return to his ‘infected’ fable delivers the same nail-chomping tension, social commentary and energetic cinematography/soundtrack mash-up as his 23 year-old original – but now with added nightmare fuel, humour, hope and yes, profundity. As a meditation on mortality and Britain it’s unsubtle, but it’s also thrilling, moving and weirdly life affirming. It could be the best 115min you never spent in therapy.

28 Years Later, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alfie Williams, Danny Boyle, Jack O‘Connell, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes
Miya Mizuno/Sony

In 28 Days Later we had Cillian Murphy’s bewildered patient waking up in an abandoned London, in 28 Weeks Later (not written by Alex Garland or directed by Boyle) we had survivors holed up in a clean sector of the UK’s capital. Now we’re a couple of decades after the original outbreak of the rage virus and Britain is a quarantined island of naked body slurpers, the rest of Europe leaving normal lives while sending their fleets to patrol the coastline and ensure the madness stays within this scepter’d isle. Very Brexit. 

While the mainland is over-run with grubby infected (fast-sprinting, slow and low, souped up ‘Alphas’), a group of survivors are self sufficient on Lindisfarne island having lapsed back into traditional roles and religious worship where the women raise children, teach and cook and the men protect, hunt and gather. When they want a party they drink home brew and sing ‘Delilah’ by Tom Jones while dancing by candlelight. Very Wicker Man.

28 Years Later, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alfie Williams, Danny Boyle, Jack O‘Connell, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes
Miya Mizuno/Sony

Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson) is an enthusiastic killer of the infected, who wants to take his 13 year-old son Spike (Alfie Williams) on his first hunt on the mainland, leaving his disorientated, ill wife Isla (Jodie Comer) to rant in her sweat soaked bed. The duo set off for a horrifying trip where blood splatters, the rules of the world are established and the glimmer of other life is seen through the trees. A fire burning far away could be evidence of the Kurz-like Doctor Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). By the time you’ve bitten every nail off, Spike and Isla are wandering through the wilderness of the North of England (and in a nod to recent British lunacy, past the Sycamore Gap) and meeting various zombies, a stranded Scandinavian sailor and the good doctor who has developed an ashes-to-ashes methodology to find solace in the dead…

28 Years Later, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alfie Williams, Danny Boyle, Jack O‘Connell, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes
Miya Mizuno/Sony

While still trading in jump scares and the mouth-drying fear of being hunted, Boyle and Garland are now more interested in finding the beauty in the horror. There’s moments when a thousand strong herd of deer undulate across a hillside, when Kelson explains his form of worshipful remembrance, when zombies splashing in a bucolic river look almost like forest sprites. And moments of human tenderness – the understanding between women that crosses insanity, the strength of a mother, the bittersweet taste of losing someone adored. How to love and lose is better than to never love at all. Tears will be shed on account of Comer’s stealth performance which sneaks up and gut-punches straight after an enjoyably silly bit concerning plastic surgery and a Shell petrol station missing its ‘S’. Fiennes is predictably perfect – iodine orange and making the most sense in a post-Covid world. The left turn comes at the end with a Jack O’Connell teaser for the sequel that nods to Jimmy Saville and a ride even more wild than this one. An infectious promise. 

28 Years Later, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alfie Williams, Danny Boyle, Jack O‘Connell, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes
Miya Mizuno/Sony

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photographs courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.
28 Years Later is in cinemas now

SINNERS

April 17, 2025

Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O‘Connell, Li Jun Li, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Canton, Sinners, Yao

Words by JANE CROWTHER

When twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan via unobtrusive CGI sleight of hand) return to their Mississippi home after fighting in WW1 and then brawling in Chicago, they’ve seen some things. Having made some cash by disreputable means in the north, the brothers are gold-toothed, tailored and handy with guns and knives – and set on opening their own juke joint in their old neighbourhood. They may pop a bullet in a would-be thief’s ass without a care, operate as a slick unit and move through the world with a cocky stride (unless they’re talking to the women they left behind), but they’re about to be shaken by ungodly sights on opening night…

Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O‘Connell, Li Jun Li, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Canton, Sinners, Yao
Eli Adé/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Rooted in the myth of a blues player paying for their talent via a deal with the devil (it’s set in Clarksville, the location for Robert Johnson’s crossroads), Ryan Coogler’s seductive, steamy take on From Dusk Til Dawn may not serve up a new scenario – one night in a bar beset by vampires – but it does provide a multi-layered, evocative and stylish night out on the sauce. In Coogler’s hands, a war for souls in a Jim Crow world has much to say about race, poverty, warfare, grief, colonisation and music, and the fact that though set in prohibition America, certain things remain depressingly the same as they ever were. 

The bigger socio-political picture is wrapped in a compellingly small human story that unfolds as the brothers enlist a gang to open their club in an old sawmill. Their cousin Sammie (Miles Canton) may be a preacher’s boy but he plays the blues like Satan himself and will lose his innocence before the sun rises. Voodoo priestess Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) is brought in as chef and provides spiritual leadership as well as finger-lickin’ catfish. Drunk musician Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) is co-opted as an act but has seen it all before; Chinese storekeepers Bo and Grace (Yao and Li Jun Li) bring the equipment and a marital quandary, while Stack’s ex Mary (Hailey Steinfeld) and a sunburnt stranger (Jack O’Connell) are white visitors who mess with the vibe in different ways.

Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O‘Connell, Li Jun Li, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Canton, Sinners, Yao
Eli Adé/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O‘Connell, Li Jun Li, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Canton, Sinners, Yao
Eli Adé/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Gorgeously costumed (Ruth E. Carter), lensed (filmed in IMAX with a thank you note to Christopher Nolan in the end credits) and production designed (Hannah Beachler); Sinners may be peopled by intriguing characters but its music is also one. Ludwig Göransson’s lush score is sultry, soulful and needs to be heard in the surround sound of a cinema, not waited for at home. It provides a standout sequence at the midpoint when the beer is flowing and the blues are slapping, when music connects past, present and future and – for the duration of a song – everything seems right with the world. It’s exactly the sort of poetic, pertinent and ballsy moment we’ve come to expect from Coogler and connects deliciously to a cheeky mid-credit and post-credit sting. Bloody good stuff.

Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O‘Connell, Li Jun Li, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Canton, Sinners, Yao
Eli Adé/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photographs by ELI ADÉ/WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC.
Sinners is in cinemas now

JACK O’CONNELL

May 16, 2024

Jack O’Connell, Back To Black, Hollywood Authentic, Greg Williams

Photographs and interview by GREG WILLIAMS
As told to Jane Crowther

Jack O’Connell doesn’t like to hurry his eggs. ‘Low and slow,’ he insists, talking me through his breakfast wrap one drizzly March Friday morning in north east London when I meet him at his home. He takes half an hour to scramble his eggs as he crisps his accompanying black pudding, sausage and streaky bacon for our brunch. ‘I’ve always wanted to do a cookery show,’ he chuckles as he diligently stirs. ‘Don’t rush them…’

The actor’s domestic vibe is similarly exacting – ‘a tidy house, a tidy mind,’ he says of his spick ‘n’ span home – and is also reflected in the way he approaches his work. Though he has form playing troublemakers, rule-breakers and trailblazers in projects such as This Is England, Skins, Starred Up, Unbroken, The North Water, SAS Rogue Heroes and Ferrari, Jack doesn’t adhere to the idea of playing a hellraiser on and off screen. ‘It’s a funny one, isn’t it?’ he says, scarfing down his breakfast wrap. ‘If I’ve got a good head on my shoulders, and I’ve slept, and I’m rested, and I’m on set, it’s the best place to be. You know what I mean?’

As Bob the dog (more of whom later) weaves round our legs, Jack shows me round his house, pointing out the art he’s bought on his travels, including a Shane McGowan (‘I picked this up in Bantry, in Cork – it’s painted with peat from the bogs’), and the plants he’s currently cultivating. ‘This fella needs to cheer up,’ he says of one of the plants he’s just repotted, its leaves scattered around the floor next to it, ‘and this fella is thriving…’ His art is mainly of musicians, which is apt considering he’s next playing the husband of Amy Winehouse, Blake Fielder-Civil, in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s new biopic, Back to Black. ‘The last five or six years, I’ve started to really, really appreciate cinema. Not just actors, but the whole craft. I’ve always loved music but I never had the attention span for films as a kid. I’d get fucking bored – unless it was Braveheart with loads of scrapping, and all that action kicking off.’

While he might not have fully appreciated film and acting as a teen growing up in Derby, it intrigued him enough to attend a drama workshop twice a week in Nottingham with Ian Smith, the acting teacher who discovered Samantha Morton. It was while he was there that Shane Meadows came to cast for This Is England in 2004. He gave Jack his first role on a project that became an awards-winner and hugely influential to British cinema. ‘I was about 14 and suddenly I’ve got a BAFTA-winning film to my name,’ he marvels. Quite the trip for a kid from an industrial town in the north of England where working at the Rolls Royce or Bombardier plant was the usual ambition. 

Jack O’Connell, Back To Black, Hollywood Authentic, Greg Williams

‘I just grew up there, playing football and doing all the normal stuff. My mum and dad worked every hour of the day. My mum had two jobs and still had bailiffs coming around. I remember the bailiffs coming and nabbing our TV. I was halfway through watching Pingu, and they fucking nabbed the TV. I remember my mum having to be really crafty with how she’d get food on the table and whatnot. And that was despite my dad working his arse off. He worked himself into the ground.’ The death of his dad at the age of 18  is something that still informs the 33-year-old today. ‘In terms of my relationship with him, I never got to speak to him as an adult, which is the biggest bereavement I still feel. With that kind of loss, you never get over it. You just cope. I had 18 years with a fine, fine man. I know lads that never even had a day with theirs. So it is what it is. But he got to see the start of where I was getting to with work.’

Shane Meadows has continued to be influential in Jack’s career as he recently turned his hand to directing a music video for Paul Weller. ‘I loved the shooting experience, then I got into the edit and was petrified, because suddenly I’ve got all this material, and I don’t know where it’s going, and I don’t know if it’s going to work. So I reached out to Shane; I hadn’t spoken to him in years. I told him what the score was, and he was like, “Oh, Jack, whenever I finish my gig, I feel like I’ve just won the award. And then I get into the edit, and I want to do myself in.” When you’re an actor, if it’s shit, you just blame the director. This time round, I had no one to blame, so it was on me.’

Jack’s latest acting work cast him opposite Marisa Abela as the two of them inhabit Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil in Back to Black. Filming on location in the couple’s real-life stomping ground of Camden, Jack was reunited with Bob – a dog he’d befriended previously while acting in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in the West End in 2018. As we head out to walk the dog, he tells me of their sliding doors moment. ‘I was shooting at the Dublin Castle pub in all my Blake garb. And who should walk past? It’d been about a year-and-a-half or two years. Bless him, he remembered.’ Now Jack borrows Bob for walks and hangouts from his owner, Lisa, when he has downtime between film shoots. Back to Black was a special project, he says, as we stroll the rain-slicked local streets to his favourite coffee shop. ‘I loved it, mate. Marisa was spellbinding. She threw everything at it. She was in every scene, it was heavy for her. I just really respected the work rate and the process.’ In preparation for the role, Jack met up with Blake, an experience he describes as something of a revelation. ‘His persona’s very public. He’s got plenty written about him in the tabloids. You think you’ve got the measure of someone based on what’s out there. I think he’s been vilified. And compared to the fella I met – I just got on with him. I was quite surprised. 

Jack O’Connell, Back To Black, Hollywood Authentic, Greg Williams

Your best tools are your ears, and what you hear, and what you play off. You do a scene three or four times, and there’s gonna be a different nuance

It just felt like I had a lot in common with him. Any time he talked about Amy, it just rang true – and you can forgive being beguiled at that age. The kind of limelight that both of them ended up in… That meeting informed me a lot.’

As we arrive at Jack’s local coffee house I ask how he chooses his roles. ‘There’s jobs that you get, and there’s jobs that you chase, you know? It’s a bit of the law of attraction. There’s such a thing as just eating a bit of humble pie, and putting your hat in the ring. Even if you get fucking ignored, blanked and rejected, you know, not everything is just going to come your way. So I’m reaching out a lot more. I’m interested in being versatile.’ Before we can discuss further we’re welcomed warmly by Rodrigo, a barista from Naples, and we get chatting about football, Maradona and Paolo Sorrentino as Jack gets his coffee on the house. The two of them sing Napoli football songs together in Italian.

We move on to the local butchers, cups warming our hands, in search of a treat for Bob. As a proud northern working-class man, Jack recognises a certain pre-judgement operates in getting roles. ‘Do you think if I had a posh accent I would have a bigger career?’ he asks. ‘What I’m trying to understand – it’s bigger than myself, and my career – is that, do you get to have really good, aspirational jobs if you didn’t go to private school?’ Does he have a point? Though he’s played a wide range of roles, eras and accents with a diverse roster of helmers (including Michael Mann on Ferrari, Angelina Jolie on Unbroken, Jodie Foster on Money Monster), it’s interesting that there have been more American directors who have seen beyond his background. There are still ‘invisible lines and glass ceilings in play’ says the actor.

Jack O’Connell, Back To Black, Hollywood Authentic, Greg Williams

Jack has worked across TV, film and theatre – so which is his favourite space to get hooked on? ‘To use a cliché, film’s a director’s medium and TV is a producer’s. On TV you’re allowed more time to tell a story in a series, but you’re shooting fucking seven to eight pages in a day. Whereas, with film, obviously there’s always restraints as it relates to budget and what have you, but you can be a bit more focused. Your best tools are your ears, and what you hear, and what you play off. You do a scene three or four times, and there’s gonna be a different nuance to react to.’

His love of cinema is both as a practitioner and a punter, and as we stroll past his local picturehouse I ask him what role in any film he would have liked to have got stuck into. ‘The first one that’s coming to my head is American Psycho and Patrick Bateman. But I just think that what Christian Bale did with that is untouchable. And Jud in Kes. Sid in Sid and Nancy. That’d be the top three there.’ We nip into the retro cinema Jack describes as a ‘little viewing glass into yesteryear’ where he tells me over a Coke that he never watches his own work on a big screen alongside an audience. ‘I just watch at home, in the comfort of your own living room. So if you need to self-flagellate, you can just do it, in privacy! But there’s got to be a childlike curiosity to what you do. You know, when a toddler is playing, they’re not scared of how they’re looking, or if they’re getting it wrong. There’s a freedom to it. We lose it – the innocence, the fucking vigour, the fearlessness. To a toddler, fear doesn’t exist – the fear of getting it wrong; the fear of looking silly. But I think that’s got to be part of the process, isn’t it? You’ve got to be given room to fail. What’s borne out of that is what’s worth mining for. It’s the oxymoron of trying to be but not act. That’s always the goal. The best example I’ve got, which is lived in, is working with Shane Meadows. The cameras didn’t come out until the afternoon. He just spent the morning figuring it out. He didn’t know the story until he got into the edit. So we didn’t know. We were just there.’ 

Photographs, interview and video by GREG WILLIAMS
As told to JANE CROWTHER
Jack O’Connell can be seen in Back to Black, out now