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In the past two years, Jack O’Connell has played a vampire in “Sinners” and a cult leader in the “28 Years Later” films. But to take on the role of tabloid editor Larry Lamb, he got even more comfortable with suave, alluring menace. “His prerogative is very simple,” O’Connell says over Zoom from London. “He’s fixated on sales numbers and whatever it’s going to take to keep that figure rising. He’ll stop at nothing — and that means bending the rules. It was very naughty.” Netflix’s “Ink,” directed by Danny Boyle and set to open the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 2, is as naughty as its central character. Lamb was the real-life editor of The Sun who — hired in 1969 by press baron Rupert Murdoch to help the tabloid break into the U.K. newspaper industry — pioneered such practices as publishing nude pictures of “Page 3 Girls.”
He also had a knack for framing stories as lurid, sexy or gleefully partisan, all to tickle readers’ resentments and libidos. In taking Murdoch’s dark vision of the world and turning it into can’t-look-away media, Lamb was Fox News’ Roger Ailes before Roger Ailes. “There’s something very seductive about these sins they’re packaging up and selling,” O’Connell says. “That’s capitalism, isn’t it?”
Murdoch, the über-capitalist whose journey out of Australia onto the global stage upended political reality, would likely approve this message. And “Ink” argues that the sins of Murdoch’s newspapers created the garish world we live in, with the consent of all of us readers. Like any juicy news story, “Ink” frames a grand drama at human scale. Here, Murdoch (Guy Pearce, building on his robber-baron “The Brutalist” energy) is at first a laughingstock. English writers and editors look down on him, calling him an “antipodean” to emphasize that he hails from Britain’s former prison-colony island. So he purchases the also-ran paper The Sun and hires Lamb, an ambitious junior editor from Northern England, empowering him to redefine the news as pulp entertainment. The partnership between two outsiders clawing their way in, joined by an equally canny journalist played by Claire Foy, comes to shape Fleet Street, the London thoroughfare where scribblers plied their trade, in Lamb’s and Murdoch’s images.
The movie is chilling in what it tells us about how we got here, but it’s not intended as a hit piece. “One of the dangers with doing anything about Rupert Murdoch is that everybody monster-izes him,” Boyle says, “as though he’s forced everybody to read The Sun! We are all responsible for this.”
“Ink” uses filmmaking vim to address tabloid intrigue. Boyle, the energetic auteur who made “Steve Jobs” and “127 Hours” into sparking, creative excavations of complicated men, is at peak provocation — and O’Connell, alternately ingratiating and hard-edged, makes for an utterly compelling antihero. There’s an irony to a film with such a mordant view of media culture debuting on one of the most closely watched stages in the world — Venice kicks off awards season, and it’s come to rival Cannes for star power. But after a recent series of high-profile Hollywood misfires like “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Bardo” and “After the Hunt,” studios have taken a step back from the Lido, which means that “Ink,” and O’Connell, have the lane to themselves.
And as the U.S. heads into the midterm elections with a growing sense of anti-establishment backlash in the air, “Ink” places politics front and center. Two years ago, the Donald Trump biopic “The Apprentice” struggled to find distribution; now, a Rupert Murdoch origin story is getting four weeks of theatrical exclusivity in December and January before hitting Netflix on Jan. 8. While Trump isn’t a character in “Ink,” the streamer’s willingness to engage the right-wing ecosystem at all, after two years of media conglomerates eschewing hot-button issues for fear of government reprisal, represents a noticeable shift.
Actors, too, are at a crossroads: O’Connell is 36, meaning that he came up at a time when franchises, not faces, were the draw. The son of an Irish railway worker and an English airline employee, O’Connell gained notice playing a street tough in the 2006 drama “This Is England” when he was only a teenager. His breakthrough as a prisoner of war in Angelina Jolie’s 2014 directorial debut, “Unbroken,” seemed to set him up as a leading man, but he shifted to crafty character work, from playing an anti-capitalist hostage taker in “Money Monster” to a man seeking to prove he was wrongfully convicted of arson in “Trial by Fire.” His version of tentpole acting has been the alluringly gnarly bloodsucker in “Sinners” or the outright demented ringleader in “28 Years Later.”
O’Connell is known for his work, not his persona off-screen; he keeps his family with a young daughter largely out of the spotlight and isn’t on social media. Now, he’s crashing the Oscar race in the kind of finely wrought character drama that, 30 years ago, packed theaters. But he’s keeping an air of mischief. O’Connell met with Fleet Street veterans and dug into archival footage of Lamb that the “Ink” production gathered for him — “appearances on talk shows in the ’70s which would be completely lost to history now”— and saw in him something worth digging into. “Even if it was a 30-second piece of footage, there were so many colors,” he recalls. “For Larry, and for all the journalists we met, they were great, larger-than-life characters, and they had a real zest for life. They had great wit and fucking thick skin.”
Fleet Street was not for wallflowers. The nexus of British journalism saw pitched competition among papers — O’Connell tells me that the bar journalists went to was nicknamed “the Stab in the Back.” These writers saw themselves as craftsmen and their field as closed to outsiders; at the Daily Mirror, the standard-bearing populist sheet, the crafty Lamb hadn’t been able to get ahead. Boyle characterizes Lamb and Murdoch’s thinking: “This huge Goliath figure — Real Madrid, if you like football — is dominating the landscape. And we’re going to bring it down.”
O’Connell sees the early-1970s moment when tabloid culture took root in the British mind as a missed opportunity for genuine social change. In his view, a prosperous society was teetering on the edge of a meaningful shift toward communitarianism before being yanked back. “I think there’s a real question mark thrown toward capitalism by this movie,” he says, “particularly the postwar socialism that was on the rise. For that to be traded in for unfettered individualism …” He stops and notes an irony — that freedom in the tabloid era gave rise to libertinism. “Liberty was what the war was fought for, wasn’t it? We have an unfettered amount of that now, and we’re getting to feed all of our tastes and interests all at once.”
In “Ink,” Lamb pushes his journalists to cover a kidnapping-and-murder case that touches his own newsroom, despite ethical queasiness. And he offers his staff a bonus anytime the words “win,” “free” or “love” are used on the front page — catering to the public interest in competition, money and sex. The Sun super-served the British brain’s pleasure centers, and “Ink,” with its careening pace through the scandal-making of pre-internet culture, delivers its share of serotonin too.
The film uses a jazzily Murdochian technique to examine how the whole world has been warped by tabloids. By the time a 24-hour stream of distractions became available via smartphone, every member of the reading public was primed to lean into their most venal interests.
“This is an origin story,” O’Connell says. “The tabloids were purporting to offer us ‘win,’ ‘free,’ ‘love’ and a peep behind the curtain.” The paper, though, took its reader perhaps half an hour to read over breakfast. “Now,” he says, “we just get the whole show on tap.”
Lately, O’Connell has been unafraid to leverage a sense of danger behind his smile. Earlier this year, that smile came with particularly sharp teeth.
On the Oscars red carpet in March, O’Connell wore a set of fangs that made him look like his “Sinners” character, Remmick. That film might not have worked so well had Remmick, its charming and malignant vampire, not believed he was trying to help the community of Black sharecroppers he was terrorizing. To him, bringing new people into the undead hive mind was an act of kindness, just as Lamb is so blinded by his mission to reinvent the news that he can’t see the harm he’s doing. “It’s arresting to see someone buy into their own thing — when you see somebody really buying into what they’re about,” O’Connell says.
He was pleased to bring Remmick to the Dolby Theatre, where he took part in the onstage production number of “I Lied to You,” the nominated song from “Sinners,” a raucous, joyful mélange of performers from across the spectrum of Black artistry. The telecast’s producers had asked him to wear prosthetic fangs once the song was about to begin, but, holding them in his pocket as he prepared to walk the carpet, O’Connell thought, “It’d be pretty fucking cool if I just dropped them in. It was a good look next to the tux, you know?”
“Sinners” showed a more freewheeling side of an actor whose earlier film work was delivered with clenched jaw. He was cast after meeting director Ryan Coogler over Zoom, “which is mad, really! You’d think there’d be screen tests.” Once on set, though, O’Connell turned Remmick into one of the most sinuously intriguing screen villains of the century so far, as he stood outside Michael B. Jordan’s nightclub wheedling patrons into inviting him past its threshold in honey-dripping tones. The film, which broke the record for Oscar nominations, with 16, and won four trophies, didn’t take best picture — was O’Connell disappointed? “I got to kick back and watch a bunch of my friends pick up Oscars,” he says. “You win some, you lose some, and I felt like we still won big. I got to hang out with them after — I was in this amazing crew where everyone’s got these gongs, and it was a wonderful night of celebrating. I got to meet Jay-Z! Childhood me was doing cartwheels.” Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s after-party went into the wee hours: “Good on him for throwing the party — it was a throwdown. I kept trying to leave. I couldn’t!”
When not talking about the “Sinners” phenomenon, though, O’Connell chooses his words carefully, unwilling to allow them to be taken out of context. Decades into his career — and newly enlightened about the many ways a journalist might misbehave — he seems still to be deciding how he feels about the media. Back in 2014, when O’Connell was promoting “Unbroken,” a Guardian reporter asked him about his “tradition” of showing up for interviews hung over, and O’Connell shrugged in response; today, he’s sprightly but holding himself in reserve. I ask whether, growing up in the spotlight as star of the phenomenally popular teen soap “Skins,” he’d found the tabloids’ glare challenging. While he won’t get specific, he acknowledges the famously aggressive British celebrity press was hardly easy: “When you’re in the crosshairs, it can be a very miserable time.” Keeping focus on his work is safer territory than courting controversy. “I’m just very wary,” he says, “of ever being found in that position.”
“Unbroken” provided an unlikely education. Asked what he learned from the movie, he replies: “All the other aspects of being in movies, which happen not on set,” he says. “The awards push we went on, the worldwide press tour — it’s essential, but no one will teach you that. Certainly not at the school I went to.” O’Connell grew up in England’s East Midlands, attending Nottingham’s Television Workshop, a free program for aspiring actors. Though he’s met “The Odyssey” actor Samantha Morton only a few times, O’Connell says he feels a special connection with her — she trained at the Workshop too. For O’Connell, not hailing from London is a point of pride, and a way into the resentful Northerner Lamb; he notes that James Graham, who adapted the “Ink” script from his own stage play, is also from the East Midlands. “If you’re from outside of London,” he says, “you are an outsider.”
O’Connell was plucked from the Television Workshop in his mid-teens to appear in “This Is England” and then as a young hunk on “Skins,” but never thought of acting as a career path. “It felt good to feel good at it, and it was very expressive,” he says. “It didn’t matter your economic background, whether you came from a good home or a not-so-good home — you were all at the Workshop, fucking around and seeing what stuck.”
That try-anything energy persists. He was cast in a spotlight role in the cliff-hanger ending of Boyle’s 2025 post-apocalyptic zombie sequel “28 Years Later.” There, he plays Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, a satanic mastermind of violence who models himself after British kids’-TV host Jimmy Savile, a celebrity who was also a prodigious sexual predator who victimized children and the elderly. “He’s playing a monster, and yet you’re still like, ‘Oh!’” Boyle says, making an expression of curiosity and intrigue. “He pulls you in.”
Jimmy became the primary antagonist in this year’s Nia DaCosta-helmed “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.” And the role brought O’Connell to Boyle. In “Ink,” O’Connell recalls Michael Fassbender’s Oscar-nominated work in Boyle’s “Steve Jobs,” alternately leveraging and restraining his inherent fire. Lamb’s eyes gleam with a devious ingenuity as he forces himself to behave at least a little professionally, and at the end of the editor’s career, O’Connell conjures a sense of deflated introspection that makes us recall just how wild he had been in his youth. “He ends up like Pacino in the end of ‘The Godfather Part II,’” Boyle says, “considering what he’s unleashed and what seems to be the outcome. And you are still drawn to him.”
Boyle had wanted O’Connell in part for his magnetism and in part because he wanted to cast geographical outsiders; Pearce, he notes, is likely too old for the late-30s Murdoch of “Ink,” but “a nuanced performance by a fellow Australian was very important to me.” But the film was a far cry from the lavishly funded and elaborate fantasy productions O’Connell had been making lately. Due perhaps to its moral complication, its unpopular subject — easier to enjoy when kept monstrous, as in the Murdoch-like figure Logan Roy on “Succession” — and its origins as a play, the movie was, Boyle admits, “tough to finance. StudioCanal did give us enough money to make the film, and I admire them for that, because there weren’t many competing offers.”
“He brought me in quite early in the process, before the film had its financing,” O’Connell says. “It’s very different from a film where you’re in a makeup chair for six hours before you start work, and then you’re waiting around for another six before you do anything. It’s a different type of fulfillment. And it’s a different type of exhaustion.”
“He preps so hard and he’s ready to take on anything,” Boyle says about O’Connell. “I worked with Gary Oldman onstage before he went to Hollywood. They’ve got that electricity — for some reason, they’ve just got it.”
Playing Lamb may represent an arrival for an actor who’s long been percolating, in part because the character ends up outdoing even his boss in his twisted vision for news-as-porn. Lamb is utterly convinced by his own plans, even as he begins to lose Murdoch’s confidence. “I was constantly impressed by Jack’s choices,” Pearce writes in an email. “I found him beautifully and constantly unpredictable. Jack brought an inner confidence that I had not accounted for at all.”
Remmick, Jimmy Crystal and Larry Lamb share an unrelenting desire to entertain, whether performing music outside a juke joint, indulging amusement with graphic violence or delighting the British reading public with scandal and drama. O’Connell may be conserving his energy in conversation — but when the show begins, he’s all in. Earlier in his career, O’Connell learned “fortitude” from stage acting, but onstage, he notes, “you rehearse for maybe two months before anyone sees it. I love a rehearsal.” In “Ink,” he was thrown into the deep end with only a week of prep time, although the production did allow sufficient time for him and Pearce to work through the movie’s opening scene, in which the pair, over a seafood dinner, plot Lamb’s installation at The Sun.
Despite the budget, there was one allowance made for the actors’ comfort. They had to keep eating, in take after take, so the meal was, at least, well prepared. “The lobster was fresh,” O’Connell says. “What’s not to love?”
Nailing Lamb’s and Murdoch’s gestalt enabled the actors to conjure up a story that operates in a realm of ambiguity. Boyle recalls meeting Murdoch, briefly, after “Slumdog Millionaire” broke out as a Fox Searchlight acquisition (and eventually won the Oscar for best picture). “I got invited to a barbecue, and he was incredibly shy,” Boyle says. “I got introduced to him because I’d made him so much money — I don’t think you get introduced to him if you haven’t made him a lot of money.” The pleasantries bled into “Ink,” where Murdoch and Lamb, attending a posh function, can’t wait to peel away and talk about their animating passion: work.
Boyle and O’Connell share this mentality — on set, they were as mission driven as Fleet Street hacks. “I’ve never seen him sit down,” O’Connell says. “I wouldn’t recognize him sat in a chair.” Boyle takes that as a compliment. “Film’s natural state is inertia,” he says. “You have to drive it — I don’t mean like a monster, but in a way that’s playful and invigorating and inspiring. So, yeah, I don’t like chairs very much. I don’t want to be seen sitting down.”
The Manchester-raised rabble-rouser who broke out with “Trainspotting” sees something familiar in the Melbourne-raised publisher — and not just Murdoch’s relentless forward momentum. “He loathed the British establishment in the way that I do,” Boyle says. “Which is stupid, because I’m well established now!” He laughs heartily, then goes on. “He’s the outsider coming in, and he was treated appallingly — like a savage.” Boyle is careful to note that people’s sour judgments of Murdoch today, now that we’ve seen, for instance, The Sun’s publication of lies about the 1989 crowd-crush incident at a Liverpool football match or the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, may well be justified. But “Ink” takes place with all of that lying ahead. “At this point in time, he’s, like all of us, hopeful.”
Murdoch exploited desires that had been growing throughout the 1960s, a decade during which, Boyle says, “for ordinary people, there was a slight loosening of morals — enough to give people the appetite to say, ‘We want a bit more.’” In depicting Lamb’s staff, a charmingly less-than-posh group hired in an “Ocean’s Eleven”-style pulling-the-gang-together montage, Boyle strived to make them engaging and sympathetic. “You’ve got this bunch of vagabonds who are the dregs of the street that nobody else wants,” he says. “They’re going to bring down this giant, the Daily Mirror. You begin to empathize with them — not quite root for them, but they’re the underdogs, and they’re fun.” In one sequence, Lamb bullies and threatens a small village library that won’t stock The Sun, causing chaos but doing so with a smirk that suggests that he’s just having a laugh. He is, Trump-like, an expert deflector. That we’re entertained by Lamb and the Sun squad as they torch journalistic norms helps us understand why this new style of media took hold. “We’re complicit,” Boyle says, “in feeling drawn to it.”
Whether audiences will embrace that feeling remains to be seen, but the story’s grabby direction and O’Connell’s dominant performance may well capture the masses. Netflix bringing “Ink” to Venice represents a big bet after last year’s festival saw mixed results for American films generally and the streamer’s offerings specifically. (“Frankenstein” emerged from the Lido with its awards-season buzz intact; “A House of Dynamite” and “Jay Kelly” didn’t go the distance.)
“It feels premature to delve into that,” O’Connell says about what the Venice berth might mean for the film’s prospects. “I’m overwhelmed. I love the end product. And I think it’s a really cool fucking movie — what it says about Britain culturally.”
For Boyle, the story is a global one — and a chance to open an overdue conversation. “I relish that the film makes you see Murdoch with fresh eyes,” he says. “These things happen because people have the appetite for it. It’s essential to acknowledge that if we’re going to change it at all.”
But — as “Ink” establishes that journalists employ the five “W”s — for O’Connell, the “what” is less important than the “why.” Asked whether he believes “Ink” depicts a tabloid culture that has led society to regress, he says, “I think so,” then pauses. “I’m more interested in, What is the lure?” he muses. “Why? Why are we drawn to it?” O’Connell didn’t, this time, need to toy with the supernatural to indulge his interest in the lure of nastiness. “Why are we so interested in social media and being given everything we want all at once? I guess it’s like moths to a flame.”
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