Jack O’Connell: Age, Sinners, SAS Rogue Heroes and His Best Films (2026)

Jack O’Connell is an English actor from Derby who first became known as the reckless James Cook in E4’s Skins and has since built one of the most respected film careers of his generation — winning the BAFTA Rising Star Award in 2015, playing Olympic runner and war hero Louis Zamperini in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, and, in 2025 and 2026, terrifying audiences as the vampire Remmick in Sinners and as Sir Jimmy Crystal in 28 Years Later and its sequel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Born on 1 August 1990 in Alvaston, Derby, he is 36 years old as of October 2026, and he is currently filming the third series of the BBC’s SAS Rogue Heroes, returning as Paddy Mayne.

At a Glance: Jack O’Connell

• Full name: Jack O’Connell
• Born: 1 August 1990, Alvaston, Derby, England — 36 years old as of October 2026
• Best known for: James Cook in Skins (2009–2010, 2013); Louis Zamperini in Unbroken (2014); Paddy Mayne in SAS Rogue Heroes (2022–present)
• Breakthrough films: Starred Up (2013), ’71 (2014) and Unbroken (2014)
• Award: Winner of the BAFTA EE Rising Star Award in 2015, decided by a public vote
• Recent roles: Remmick in Sinners (2025); Sir Jimmy Crystal in 28 Years Later (2025) and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
• Television: Godless (2017), The North Water (2021), SAS Rogue Heroes (2022–present)
• Training: Central Junior Television Workshop, Nottingham

Who Is Jack O’Connell?

Jack O’Connell is an English actor whose career has run from a Derby youth theatre workshop to Hollywood leading roles without ever losing the raw, volatile energy that made him stand out as a teenager. He was born on 1 August 1990 in Alvaston, a suburb of Derby in the East Midlands, and grew up there before training at the Central Junior Television Workshop in nearby Nottingham. His teacher there, Ian Smith, was the first person O’Connell thanked from the stage when he won his BAFTA.

O’Connell made his professional acting debut as a teenager on the BBC medical soap Doctors in 2005, and his film debut followed a year later in Shane Meadows’ This Is England (2006), playing the teenage skinhead Pukey Nicholls. He was the villainous gang leader Brett in the horror film Eden Lake (2008), and he faced Michael Caine in the vigilante drama Harry Brown (2009).

He is part of a generation of British screen actors that includes Damson Idris, who likewise moved from acclaimed television drama into major film roles. What sets O’Connell apart is how deliberately he has mixed prestige work with genre films.

How Did Jack O’Connell Become Famous?

O’Connell became famous as James Cook — “Cook” — in E4’s teen drama Skins. He joined the cast in the third series in 2009 and played Cook through the fourth series in 2010, returning for the two-part “Rise” story in the seventh and final series in 2013. Cook was the show’s wildest character: promiscuous, self-destructive, funny and loyal in his own chaotic way, and O’Connell’s performance was widely praised as the standout of the show’s second generation.

Skins made him a household name among young British audiences, but it was the work he did immediately afterwards that turned him into a serious film actor. In 2010 he starred in the BBC television drama Dive, and in 2011 he played the footballer Bobby Charlton in the BBC drama United, about the Munich air disaster and the rebuilding of Manchester United. Both showed a range Cook had only hinted at.

What Was Jack O’Connell’s Breakthrough in Film?

O’Connell’s film breakthrough came in a remarkable one-two punch across 2013 and 2014. First came Starred Up (2013), David Mackenzie’s prison drama, in which he played Eric Love, a violent young offender transferred early to an adult prison. The performance won him Best Actor at the Dublin International Film Festival, and both Starred Up and his next film earned him British Independent Film Award nominations.

That next film was ’71 (2014), Yann Demange’s thriller about a young British soldier, Gary Hook, separated from his unit during a riot in Belfast at the height of the Troubles. O’Connell carried almost the entire film, and critics treated it as confirmation that the Skins star was now a leading man.

Then came the role that made him a Hollywood name. In Unbroken (2014), directed by Angelina Jolie, O’Connell played Louis Zamperini, the American Olympic runner who survived 47 days adrift in the Pacific after his plane crashed and then spent more than two years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. It was his first major Hollywood picture, and it required a physical transformation and a performance that carried the film almost single-handedly. The National Board of Review gave him its Breakthrough Award jointly for Starred Up and Unbroken.

The year ended with the award that confirmed his arrival. On 8 February 2015, O’Connell won the EE Rising Star Award at the BAFTA Film Awards, beating fellow nominees Margot Robbie, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley in a public vote. BAFTA’s own profile of O’Connell records the win, and the award was presented to him by James McAvoy, the first ever winner of the Rising Star Award. In his speech, O’Connell thanked Ian Smith of the Television Workshop, the teacher who had first encouraged him to act.

What Are Jack O’Connell’s Biggest Film Roles?

After Unbroken, O’Connell worked steadily across Hollywood and British film. In Money Monster (2016), directed by Jodie Foster, he played Kyle Budwell, a hostage-taker who storms a live television studio, opposite George Clooney and Julia Roberts. In Trial by Fire (2018) he played Cameron Todd Willingham, a man executed for murdering his children, alongside Laura Dern. He also played an undercover FBI agent in Seberg (2019), starring Kristen Stewart.

His recent film work has been some of his most talked-about. In Michael Mann’s Ferrari (2023), he played British racing driver Peter Collins, part of the ensemble around Adam Driver’s Enzo Ferrari. In Netflix’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (2022), directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, he played Oliver Mellors, the working-class gamekeeper, opposite Emma Corrin’s Connie — a role that, as Derby’s local press noted at the time, let the Derby-born actor use his own accent on screen for once.

In Back to Black (2024), Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Amy Winehouse biopic, O’Connell played Blake Fielder-Civil, Winehouse’s ex-husband, opposite Marisa Abela in the title role. Taylor-Johnson cast him first, before Winehouse herself had been cast, and the film examines Winehouse’s life largely through the prism of that all-consuming relationship. It was a difficult, unsympathetic part, and one more example of O’Connell’s willingness to play men who are hard to like.

What TV Shows Has Jack O’Connell Starred In?

Television has been as important to O’Connell’s career as film, and his three biggest television roles show three very different sides of him.

In Godless (2017), Netflix’s Western miniseries, he played Roy Goode, an outlaw on the run from his former mentor, opposite Michelle Dockery and Jeff Daniels. The performance earned him a Critics’ Choice Television Award nomination.

In The North Water (2021), the BBC’s five-part Arctic drama adapted by Andrew Haigh from Ian McGuire’s novel, he played Patrick Sumner, a disgraced ex-army surgeon who signs up as ship’s doctor on an ill-fated whaling expedition in the late 1850s. The series, which co-starred Colin Farrell as the murderous harpooner Henry Drax and Stephen Graham as Captain Brownlee, premiered on BBC Two on 10 September 2021. Its location work took the cast and crew as far as 81 degrees north, into the pack ice north of Svalbard — which the BBC said was believed to be the furthest north a television drama had ever filmed.

But his defining television role is Paddy Mayne in SAS Rogue Heroes, Steven Knight’s BBC drama about the formation of the SAS during the Second World War, based on Ben Macintyre’s 2016 book. The first series premiered on BBC One on 30 October 2022, with O’Connell as Mayne, the hard-drinking, poetry-quoting Irish rugby international who became one of the SAS’s founding officers, alongside Connor Swindells as David Stirling. The second series, which premiered on 1 January 2025, moved the action to the European theatre and put Mayne in command of the regiment after Stirling’s capture — and both series hold a rare 100% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. The BBC renewed the drama for a third series in September 2025, and Radio Times reported in January 2026 that series 3 was filming in France, set in the summer of 1944, with O’Connell returning as Mayne. As of October 2026, no air date has been announced.

Who Did Jack O’Connell Play in Sinners?

In Sinners (2025), Ryan Coogler’s horror film set in 1932 Mississippi, O’Connell played Remmick, an Irish immigrant vampire who arrives at the juke joint opened by Michael B. Jordan’s twin brothers Smoke and Stack and lays siege to it on opening night. The film, which also starred Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Wunmi Mosaku and Delroy Lindo, was released in cinemas on 18 April 2025 and went on to pass $350 million at the global box office — a remarkable result for an original R-rated horror film.

Remmick is the film’s antagonist, but O’Connell played him as something stranger than a straightforward monster: a charming, music-loving drifter whose politeness never quite hides his appetite. Coogler has said the character draws on the Irish folk legend of the Abhartach, a figure from County Derry folklore that some historians believe helped inspire Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Who Is Jimmy Crystal in 28 Years Later?

O’Connell’s other major horror role of 2025 was Sir Jimmy Crystal in 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s return to the world of the Rage virus. The film, released on 20 June 2025, follows a 12-year-old boy, Spike, on the mainland of a quarantined Britain. O’Connell appears only in the final minutes, as the leader of a gang of tracksuit-wearing survivors who call themselves variations of the name “Jimmy” and rescue Spike from the infected. The character had in fact been introduced as a boy in the film’s opening scene, set during the original outbreak in 2002, and the adult Jimmy is what that traumatised child became.

The scene divided audiences, not least because the gang’s look — matching tracksuits, blond wigs and chunky gold jewellery — was widely noted as evoking disgraced presenter Jimmy Savile, a parallel Boyle has discussed in interviews.

Whatever viewers made of the ending, it was a set-up: Jimmy Crystal is the central villain of the sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta and released in the UK on 14 January 2026 and in the United States on 16 January 2026. In it, Spike is inducted into Jimmy’s gang while Ralph Fiennes’ Dr Kelson tends his bone temple, and O’Connell’s performance as the charismatic, menacing cult leader was widely praised. A third film in the planned trilogy is in development.

What Is Jack O’Connell Doing Now?

As of October 2026, O’Connell’s most recent released work is 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which arrived in cinemas in January 2026, and his current job is the third series of SAS Rogue Heroes, filming in France. That is a fitting place for him to be: a decade after Unbroken made him a star, he is still best known for playing real and fictional soldiers, and still working with the British directors and writers — Danny Boyle, Steven Knight, Andrew Haigh — who have shaped his career.

It is also worth noting what he has not done. Unlike several of his fellow BAFTA Rising Star winners, O’Connell has never fronted a major franchise, and projects once announced for him — including an Alexander McQueen biopic and a new telling of the Bonnie and Clyde story — never made it beyond development. In interviews around Back to Black in 2024, he was open about having found the early years of fame difficult, crediting Jolie with helping him change his approach to the work. At 36, with Sinners and the 28 Years Later films behind him and SAS Rogue Heroes series 3 ahead, his career looks less like a delayed promise and more like a deliberate one.

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