His eyes glow with menace in Ryan Coogler's latest, the barnstorming Sinners, but back in 2014, actor Jack O’Connell was building a reputation for an intensity that leapt off the screen.
His early movies had marked him out as a talent to watch, and this was the year he found himself working alongside some of the biggest names in Hollywood — Angelina Jolie, The Coen Brothers and Roger Deakins were just a few. We're talking about Unbroken, which is available to watch now on Netflix in the US.
The true story of Louis Zamperini (O'Connell), a rebellious teenager who found his way into athletics and competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, it's an extraordinary tale of courage and survival.
His plan to be first person to run a mile in under four minutes was cut short by the outbreak of World War Two and he joined the military.
After his plane crashed in the Pacific, he and two other crew members survived a staggering 47 days adrift in the ocean, battling starvation, extreme heat and in constant fear of being captured by the enemy.
Picked up by the Japanese navy, they were sent to a POW camp, where Zamperini’s defiance made him a target for one particular officer, who subjected him to beatings and torture until the end of the war.
The movie immediately grips with its opening, a powerful aerial combat sequence: one second Zamperini and his crew are firing at the enemy, the next they’re spinning round to dodge their deadly fire. Death and destruction could happen at any moment yet, when the blazing plane hits the water, it’s almost beyond belief that anybody survives.
It's the start of an even bigger story and a film that, despite a sense of old school Hollywood, is both inspirational and full of details that underline its respectful but unflinching attitude to both the narrative and the man at the centre of it all.
In the director’s chair for just the third time, Jolie assembled a line-up of talent to give the movie the necessary emotional weight and authenticity. Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the script, with contributions from William Nicholson, while their cinematographer of choice, Roger Deakins, was behind the camera and landed an Oscar nomination for his work.
But he had to wait until 2018 to finally get his hands on one of those little gold statuettes. He won at his 14th attempt for Blade Runner 2049. Alexandre Desplat composed the score and, although he won an Oscar that year, it was for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (one of our 100 best movies of all time).
Jolie also chose a clutch of emerging young actors to play Zamperini and his comrades. O’Connell had already impressed in uncompromising prison drama Locked Up (2013), as well as playing a British soldier on the run in tough Northern Ireland-set thriller ‘71 (2014) and in Unbroken, he was singled out for his transparency and commitment, but most of all for his charisma. His co-stars included Domhnall Gleeson (Brooklyn), Finn Wittrock (If Beale Street Could Talk), Garrett Hedlund (Triple Frontier) and John Magaro (Past Lives). O’Connell went on to work with George Clooney and Jodie Foster in Money Monster (2016).
On TV, O’Connell has become the undoubted star of the World War Two drama series Rogue Heroes.
While Unbroken has its eye firmly on a specific time in Zamperini’s life, in the real world, his harrowing wartime experiences never left him. Suffering badly from PTSD and nightmares, he turned to Christianity and met his captors in Japan to tell them he had forgiven them. The only guard to refuse a visit was the officer responsible for his torture.
Zamperini acted as a consultant on the film, providing advice on a number of different aspects of the story, especially his time as a prisoner of war. He died on July 2, 2014, aged 97, but was able to watch a rough cut of the film on Angelina Jolie's laptop from his hospital bed.
O'Connell has continued to make a name for himself in more recent titles such as Ferrari (2023) and last year’s Back To Black. He's due back in theaters later in the year in Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later with Aaron Taylor Johnson, Ralph Fiennes and Jodie Comer. With Sinners already topping the Easter box office on both sides of the Atlantic, 2025 could turn out to be his biggest year yet. Unbroken was a taste of things to come.
Unbroken is on Netflix in the US. It is available in the UK on Prime Video.
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