Sam Rockwell and Josh O’Connor on Theater, Research and Borrowing From Great Actors

For Sam Rockwell and Josh O’Connor, acting is part apprenticeship, part research, and part borrowing with intention. Their conversation turns on the craft beneath a performance: how theater prepares actors for film, how a line becomes playable, and why studying another actor’s choices can be a practical tool rather than imitation.

They met while both were heading back to the stage. Rockwell was preparing for A View from the Bridge, while O’Connor was about to begin rehearsals for Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy. Rockwell described the return as daunting after time away: he had worked on the play over Christmas, set it aside for a film, and now faced the moment when preparation had to become performance. With film commitments overlapping, he expected his understudy might cover three shows.

O’Connor was also returning after a long break. His last play had been Thomas Dekker’s Elizabethan comedy The Shoemaker’s Holiday, performed 12 years earlier. He remembered a production he thought was poor, but one he enjoyed making. The play follows an aristocrat who disguises himself as a Dutch shoemaker to win a woman’s favor. Its uneven reception, both in its own era and in O’Connor’s production, made the experience all the more memorable.

Theater as training ground

Rockwell’s route through acting took in theater and independent film before Confessions of a Dangerous Mind established him as a leading man with a sharper, more unpredictable edge. Across a career of three decades, he has moved between comic and threatening registers, and between stage and screen. He sees theater as a strong foundation for screen work, even if the practical habits of a film set have to be learned while working.

He pointed to Christopher Walken as an example of stage experience carrying into film. Before Walken delivered his memorable speech in Pulp Fiction, Rockwell noted, he had played Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams and other demanding stage roles. In Rockwell’s view, that history gives an actor a kind of readiness: the work has been exercised in front of an audience, and the performer arrives on camera with choices already sharpened.

Rockwell connected that idea to his own path, including American Buffalo before The White Lotus, and to Woody Harrelson’s theater background. He described stage practice as a form of tuning up. Film brings its own unfamiliar conditions, he said, but those can be picked up on the job; the ability to inhabit text and sustain a performance is harder to acquire without doing the work.

O’Connor’s training followed a different structure. He spent three years at drama school focused on theater, studying texts and Shakespeare, with little instruction in film or television. Learning how to work on a set came later, through experience. He sees drama school as a system that may be changing, and suggested that some programs remain too centered on stage work to prepare actors for the range of jobs they will encounter.

Rockwell studied the Meisner technique for two years rather than attending a conservatory. He later added voice work because he wanted to do more theater. The contrast between their paths led them to a shared idea: acting can develop through a gradual apprenticeship, with early work building skills and confidence before larger opportunities arrive.

O’Connor recalled restaurant jobs and auditions as some of the happiest years of his career. A play became his “golden ticket,” but he remembers the period before that breakthrough with particular fondness: he felt content, excited and energized by the uncertainty. Rockwell recognized the appeal of that old-school route, where stage work can lead toward film, and cited actors such as Gary Oldman and Daniel Day-Lewis as part of that tradition.

Heroes, influence and the work of watching

Their discussion of acting heroes begins with actors known for unruly charisma. O’Connor named Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Richard Burton and Oliver Reed, whose careers grew through company work and progressively larger roles around the United Kingdom. Rockwell added O’Toole to his own list and recommended a documentary about him, recalling that it includes reflections from his former wives.

Rockwell also spoke about Walken and Dustin Hoffman as performers whose stage experience informs their screen presence. He remembers seeing a filmed Broadway production of Death of a Salesman, with Walken as Biff Loman and Hoffman as Willy Loman, when he was about 18 and considering acting as a career. Watching that performance on a small television changed his sense of what acting could be. Soon after, he went to New York and pursued the work.

That kind of close attention remains central to how both actors think about influence. O’Connor admitted that he watches performances and wants to “steal” from them. Rockwell agreed, describing the practice as “action shopping”: noticing a specific action in another performance and adapting it to a new piece of material.

He illustrated the idea with Shakespeare. While working on the phrase “Fie, fie, upon her,” he looked up the word and found that it expressed an outburst of shame. To make the archaic phrase active for himself, he connected it to a scene in Kramer vs. Kramer, in which Dustin Hoffman’s character confronts his boss after being fired, with custody proceedings for his son looming. Rockwell borrowed the emotional action of Hoffman’s repeated “Shame on you” and used that feeling to find a playable route into Shakespeare’s words.

For Rockwell, the technique is not about inserting new dialogue into a play. It is a rehearsal tool: paraphrasing helps an actor personalize the material and understand what a line is doing. He thinks that can be especially helpful with Shakespeare and Chekhov, whose language may feel distant, but can also serve writers such as Tennessee Williams and Odets. A phrase that sounds dated in the mouth can become more immediate when the actor identifies its present-tense intention.

O’Connor has used a related approach in playing Prince Charles. Rather than aiming for a surface imitation, he described starting with a kind of blank canvas and adding the details that shape the character. He praised Rockwell’s portrayal of George W. Bush in Vice for feeling embodied rather than like a collection of recognizable mannerisms. If viewers are focused only on identifying an impression, O’Connor suggested, they can miss the scene’s emotional stakes.

They compared that distinction with biographical performances that make a person feel present without turning the actor into a replica. Rockwell cited Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn and Tommy Lee Jones as her husband in Coal Miner’s Daughter, along with Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line and Jamie Foxx in Ray. O’Connor brought up Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, where several actors play facets of Bob Dylan. Cate Blanchett’s theatrical, surreal interpretation felt vivid to him precisely because the film did not claim to pin Dylan down. The performance offered an essence, not a definitive copy.

Finding the line, then learning it

For all their talk of technique, the actors were candid about the basic anxiety of memorizing dialogue. Rockwell said that fear often drives his preparation: he wants to be ready, but he can never quite remember how to learn lines. O’Connor recognized the pattern. He sometimes flips through a script hoping the words will sink in by osmosis, adding notes and markings that can look like a developed process from the outside. In truth, he said, the annotations can be a way to delay the inevitable task of committing the lines to memory.

They laughed about the small rituals that accumulate around the work, from smiley faces to other marks in the margins. Both know that eventually the script has to become part of the actor’s body. For Wild Horse Nine, Rockwell and John Malkovich ran the material repeatedly, much as they might prepare a play. Rockwell found the repetition useful but time-consuming, and joked that memorization seems to get harder with age. O’Connor answered that his own brain already felt unreliable.

The film reunited Rockwell with writer-director Martin McDonagh, following three films and one play together. Their stage collaboration was A Behanding in Spokane, which also brought Rockwell together with Walken. They later made Seven Psychopaths with Colin Farrell and Harrelson. Wild Horse Nine also features Tom Waits, whose work O’Connor found deeply moving.

O’Connor said McDonagh can make an audience feel a great deal through what remains beneath the dialogue. Rockwell compared the quality to a kind of “bromance Pinter”: precise language carrying emotional weight just below the surface. He described Wild Horse Nine as having the texture of a play, a quality that suited both him and Malkovich, who share a background in theater.

Rockwell recalled weekend line sessions with Malkovich, which often turned into stories about the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and the stage production of True West that helped make Malkovich’s career. He also described Malkovich’s performance as Biff in Death of a Salesman as extraordinary. For Rockwell, Malkovich’s appeal lies in a striking combination of qualities: a forceful, almost gorilla-like masculinity alongside a delicate, balletic femininity.

O’Connor saw a related tension in Wild Horse Nine. The film’s men carry the implications of their work as CIA agents, while the story also makes room for tenderness and friendship between men. Rockwell agreed that male companionship is a recurring current in McDonagh’s writing, where intimacy can sit beside menace without either quality cancelling the other.

Research, accents and becoming someone else

O’Connor enjoys the research that comes with a role. He described going to libraries, choosing books, collecting details and writing them down as a way to try on another occupation. The process makes him feel a little like a journalist or detective, and he values the small skills and facts that acting lets him pick up along the way.

Rockwell praised O’Connor’s work in Challengers, where he played a rebellious character with an ease that Rockwell associated with James Dean and Cool Hand Luke. O’Connor did not claim a singular formula for that quality; he admitted to borrowing from other actors. Rockwell’s response was simple: that kind of borrowing is part of the craft.

Accents present a more specific challenge. O’Connor was preparing for the Italian New York sound required by Golden Boy, trying to avoid a broad caricature while respecting the play’s distinctive writing. Rockwell asked how O’Connor had approached Prince Charles, whose voice seemed to him to carry both the actor and the historical figure. O’Connor described his choices as another version of paraphrasing: begin with an open foundation, then let the accent add color.

Rockwell’s own portrayal of George W. Bush in Vice came up as a parallel. O’Connor said it felt like a full embodiment, rather than a recognizable impersonation. That balance matters when playing real people: a performance should let the audience follow the story and its emotion, rather than stopping at the pleasure of recognizing a familiar voice or gesture.

They agreed that the same principle applies beyond biographical roles. Whether the text is by Arthur Miller or Clifford Odets, the actor needs to come through the language. Rockwell’s plan for a line in A View from the Bridge was to translate “You mothers” into a more forceful contemporary expression in his mind, then use that private paraphrase to make the line land. His joke about adding a car horn underlined the gap between written language and the way a phrase might feel in the body.

Back to the stage

O’Connor’s Golden Boy rehearsals were due to begin on Monday. He was learning enough to be prepared for the first day, while accepting that blocking and rehearsal would shape the rest. Rockwell had a longer runway for A View from the Bridge: rehearsal was scheduled for late October, previews for November and the opening for December. He described the intervening period as his chance to get the play into his system.

The talk turned to roles they still wanted to play. O’Connor named Richard II. Rockwell had worked on a workshop of Hamlet, including five or six scenes, and had been absorbed by it for a time, but felt he was now too old for the younger parts he had once considered, such as Mercutio. He mentioned Bottom as a role he would happily take on, then settled on Mercutio as a leading Shakespearean ambition, with Petruchio another appealing possibility. O’Connor suggested Iago, recalling Daniel Craig’s performance in the role as a kind of theatrical magic.

They floated the idea of working together on Shakespeare, perhaps first as a play and later as a film. O’Connor recalled that when he and Jessie Buckley made Romeo and Juliet into a film, they had joked that Shakespeare should stay onstage. Their exchange ended with a more open possibility: start with the play and decide what comes after.

That instinct fits the rest of their conversation. For Rockwell and O’Connor, preparation is rarely a straight line from script to performance. It involves study, repetition, borrowed actions, personal paraphrase and the discoveries that arrive in rehearsal. Their next stage roles will put those methods to work in different ways: one actor returning to the boards after years away, the other stepping back in after a 12-year gap.

Sam Rockwell wears Suit and Shirt Burberry. Tie Hermès. Shoes Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.

Shirt and Pants Burberry. Tie Hermès. Watch Rolex.

Grooming: Rheanne White using Bumble and Bumble and Westman Atelier at Tracey Mattingly Agency.

Photography Assistant: David Jaffe.

Fashion Assistant: Erik Brambila Zavalza.

Production Director: Alexandra Weiss.

Photo Producer: Georgia Ford.

Production: Farago Projects.

Production Management: Christine Carreira.

Production Coordination: Elissa Graddy.

On-set Production: Aurora Wardlaw.

Production Intern: Lena Levy.

Post-production: The Hand of God.

Location: Blonde Studios.