Josh O’Connor: I Was Kicked Out of Church as a Child for Smiling Too Much
According to CinemaDrame News Agency, Josh O’Connor has revealed that he was expelled from church as a child for “smiling too much.” The 35-year-old English actor, who played a young Prince Charles in Netflix’s The Crown and a Catholic priest in Netflix’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, said in an interview with Late Night with Seth Meyers that he served as an altar boy during his childhood.
He said: “I was an altar boy, and in a way it was my first attempt at being on what I thought was a stage, but I got fired for smiling too much. I think my mum said to the priest, ‘He’s smiling in the presence of the Lord,’ but I was smiling because I could see my brothers and it was funny.” Meyers jokingly added: “A smiling altar boy is something religions need!”
O’Connor, who previously played a priest in the film Emma, told Vogue about his childhood in church: “I was wearing a ridiculous outfit, my brothers were watching me, I was waving at them, and maybe I wasn’t behaving politely enough. Perhaps it was the first signs of theatrical behavior.”
In Wake Up Dead Man, written and directed by Rian Johnson, detective Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig, attempts to solve his “most dangerous case” yet. When identifying a suspect in a murder seems impossible, he teams up with the town’s police chief, played by Mila Kunis, to unravel the mystery. Other cast members in the sequel include Cailee Spaeny, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Andrew Scott, Jeremy Renner, and Kerry Washington.
Andrew Scott, another cast member of Wake Up Dead Man, previously played a priest in the series Fleabag. O’Connor said: “Josh Brolin and I were trying our absolute best to be the best priests possible, and Andrew was just sitting there very calmly — you know, he’s the best priest in the world.”
