I did not have a Brat Summer. I had a Challengers summer. Every time I went for a run I listened to the Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross score for Luca Guadagnino’s sweaty tennis throuple movie—actually the Boys Noize remixed version, if we’re being specific. And it was only partially because that score is an unhinged banger. No an even bigger part of why “Yeah x10” was my 2024 soundtrack was that listening to it made me picture Josh O’Connor. And picturing Josh O’Connor in Challengers is one hell of a run-harder inspiration.
Strutting around in his little tennis shorts (and less) with deplorable amounts of confidence, the swinging-dick black-hat to Mike Faist’s good boy beta Art—and a case could be made that Challengers is Luca’s version of a Western—O’Connor’s character of Patrick was delicious toxicity. Really all three of its characters are toxic in their own ways, but what a cocktail (née cocktease) together they make.
I was 100% Team Patrick, since he gobbled down on bananas and churros with equal abandon while staring deep, so deep, into his best buddy’s eyes. Textually bi (even if that doesn’t go further on-screen than a sloppy surprise kiss and a long pause on a dude’s profile on Tinder) Patrick is the real structural abutment that’s holding this triangle together, no matter how often the film frames Zendaya in its center. It’s Patrick’s gravitational pull, lust and competition in equal measure, that proves irresistible. Hell it yanks Art right over the net and into his arms in the end.
And having watched Josh O’Connor closely ever since his gorgeous turn in God’s Own Country in 2017, the true frisson of his performance as Patrick is just how far outside his wheelhouse it stands. Just look no further than his turn in Alice Rohrwacher’s gorgeously gritty neorealist-ish La Chimera that began the year for full proof of O’Connor’s range. Playing Arthur, a lovelorn Etruscan artifacts smuggler in the world’s filthiest white suit, he’s all weary gazes and unknowable Cheshire smiles—all the charisma with not a whisper of the bravado, O’Connor pulls us under a totally different kind of spell here. One that’s quiet, outside of time, but no less hypnotic. Yes he carries a big stick, but it’s magic!
By all accounts this humbler temperament is closer to O’Connor’s own real world personality, which isn’t hard to believe given how adorably he blushed his way through his awards run for The Crown a couple of years back. And yet, here on the cusp of starring in the third installment of Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc series as well as the next great big Steven Spielberg picture, O’Connor used his 2024 cachet to write and produce a gay teenager love story called Bonus Track? Just how much of my heart does this man want to devour?
And let’s not forget that on top of those two massive projects he’s got coming up, he’s also starring in another gay love story of his own—one opposite my 2023 Pajiba 10 FYC entry Paul Mescal, no less! The History of Sound from Living and Mary & George director Oliver Hermanus just might be my most #1 anticipated 2025 title of them all. So I don’t expect this Josh O’Connor love train to stop rolling any time soon. Better order more churros—this is the long haul.