Jack O’Connell on taking a bite out of Sinners

Jack O’Connell barely featured in the first trailer for Sinners, released on 24^th September 2024. ​“My back made the trailer!” the actor says, laughing, as did his backside, and a blinked shot of his shivering torso. But if you didn’t know it was him, you’d have missed the Derbyshire lad.

That, of course, was a deliberate move from writer-director Ryan Coogler. Why give away the horror at the heart of your horror epic? Why reveal your hand and show your infernal antagonist in all his gory glory so far out from release?

Now, after 17 million YouTube views of that trailer and $161.6m at the global box-office in 10 days, everyone knows Remmick: wily, cajoling, fooling, drooling, banjo-playing vampire prince, an ageless Irish wraith promising eternal salvation-damnation via folk music, Irish dancing and an incantatory rendition of Rocky Road to Dublin.

Coogler’s epic is the movie event of the year. The fifth feature from the director of Black Panther is a tour de force of dual acting from main man Michael B. Jordan. For those yet to purchase a cinema ticket, it’s an incisive, time-tricksy reckoning and foreshadowing of the centuries-spanning trauma of slavery and racism; an exploration of white appropriation of the blues; and a good old-fashioned cinematic thrill-ride. It’s also really scary.

At Sinners’ black heart is Remmick, the unearthly embodiment of blood-sucking exploitation in all its forms. Twinkle-toed, fast-fingered and needle-fanged, O’Connell is here to drag straight to hell everyone in Smoke and Stack’s juke joint on opening night.

The always-busy North London-based actor was last seen on telly in SAS: Rogue Heroes and in cinemas as Amy Winehouse’s dodgy fella in Back to Black. Now, to better stick our teeth into Sinners’ bad guy, we tracked the actor down to Australia, where he’s about to start shooting the sequel to last year’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire alongside Kaitlyn Dever, and where he arrived shortly after Sinners’ blockbuster opening weekend. It’s all a long way from Skins.

Congratulations, Jack. What are your feelings on how well Sinners has done, not just critically and commercially but also in terms of dominating the cultural conversation?

I’m a bit out of the loop with regards to the final part of that question. I’m way down here just trying to stay busy. But from what I’ve noticed, and from what people are telling me, yeah, the reaction has been everything you’d want and hope for a film like this.

It just helps keep the faith that what we do can sometimes can do that – and mean something to people. It’s great for everyone involved. With Ryan Coogler, you’ve got a director that is a fan of cinema first. So he’s making films based on what he would love to go and see. It’s great that that’s evidently a shared view.

I know that Ryan reached out to you directly, so it wasn’t really a case of auditioning. How did he pitch this movie and this character?

I’m trying to think about what we first spoke about… I just had a tonne of questions because – ha – as you can imagine, reading this script for the first time, there was quite a lot that I needed to ask Ryan! And he was so open. But one of the first things I needed to know was: what is Rocky Road to Dublin doing in this story?

I hoped that it was there because of the sharing of cultures and then demonstrating all these different influences, including the Irish one. And what it meant with regards to this moment in time and American history. And it turned out, speaking to him, that that’s why it was there. That was what Remmick was bringing to the [story].

One element is that musical throughline, linking Irish folk music, African griots, American blues and onwards into R&B and hip hop in the epic dance scene inside the juke joint.

You see it with the dancing, man. All this stuff is age-old. It’s almost impossible to put a date on it, because it is ancient. That’s what we’re getting at. That’s what Ryan’s getting at, a sense of something eternal about it. We didn’t go into that much depth on our initial chat, but definitely by the time we were on set together, we were having those sorts of conversations.

He’s also making a connective point about Irish oppression and colonisation, and Black oppression and exploitation. Both, of course, at the hands of Britain.

It’s there. Certainly by that final speech from Remmick, he’s explaining what Christianity brought to Ireland all them millennia ago… But you’ve got to dig around a little bit in terms of the Irish story, and the Irish Catholic story, to really get the measure of what Remmick is referring to. It is stacked in thousands of years of history, quite an oppressive one. And what’s borne out of that, this music and this culture. Then [it’s] drawing parallels with what blues music has meant to the American South.

How challenging was a role that required, on top of the Louisiana accent and, you know, the vampire stuff, you playing banjo, singing and Irish dancing?

Listen, man, you name it, I’ll fucking do it! I’ll be honest, the Irish dancing I had a little experience in as a kid, albeit nearly 30 years ago. Banjo, well – I love that part of this job. I love that initial reading of something and going: ​‘Shit, this is way out of my league… I’m out of my depth… fuck…’ That initial panic. Then you just go about rehearsing it with a rocket up your arse.

What was the prosthetics and makeup process like for when Remmick is in full vampire mode?

Sometimes it was five hours to get in the full get-up. It was new to me. I’ve had some experience of that but nothing to this degree. The teeth were very expertly done. Once they were in, they were in, and you didn’t really have to fuck around too much. Didn’t like the [red contact] lenses that much. I had [prosthetic] pieces on my face, contorting your mouth in all sorts of directions. Stuff like that, you have to surrender the fact that it is a little uncomfortable.

What about the vampires’ drool? Was that actor’s own?

No, someone just came and dabbed a bit onto my chin at the right point in the scene. Mad! But by that point so much fucking outrageous stuff was happening [onset] that that comparatively felt straightforward and normal. I didn’t get to taste it, though.

What were the technicalities of filming opposite two Michaels? Are you doing double takes for everything?

No, it was quite similar [to regular scenes]. You’re filming one way with Michael as Smoke. Then he goes off, gets changed, you probably do some other stuff to fill time, roll cameras on something. Then, he comes back as Stack. It was great, though. The little distinctions between each character were really palpable. And great to watch.

Ryan didn’t expressly say why he thought you were Remmick, but he did say he’d loved you in Starred Up [David Mackenzie’s ferociously intense 2013 prison drama, in which O’Connell played a violent inmate]. Did he explain what it was about that role in that movie that spoke to him about you?

Not necessarily, no. Only that he said he saw it, he rated it. That film is over 10 years old now. It was great chatting to someone, from across the pond as well, who that film resonated with – and we’re still discussing it. But nothing any more specific than that, really, with regards to casting me for Remmick.

We’re even further out from Skins. How much of a gift to you all was the fact that Skins took a chance on regular kids who weren’t nepo babies or born with spoons in their mouth?

Maybe you’ve touched on something there that’s really sort of illustrative. For our cohort, Kaya and mine, it was an open audition. They’re pretty much unheard of now, open auditions where tonnes and tonnes of kids are coming through. They’re time-consuming, and they’re a commitment. I guess the antithesis to that is the self-tape. So maybe the fact that it was an open audition. And I think that was the case for Nic and Daniel and Dev’s generation.

You had to turn up, and you had to deliver. And what a great way to discover young actors. Because where is that happening now? Is anywhere doing that these days? I don’t know.

There’s already the inevitable chat about another Sinners movie. You do go up in smoke at the end of this one, but at the same time, you are the undead. Would you be up for a sequel?

This is it man: I kind of feel like I do fucking die in this. There’s definitely a death! But I wouldn’t be surprised, anything can happen – it’s Ryan Coogler. But if there’s a prequel to be made, then I stand a better chance. He can fucking count me in straight away!

Sinners is in cinemas now. And will be for some time.